


Green in the Whole Galaxy

by salamanderinspace



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Canon-Typical Violence, Enemies to Something, Feelings, Forcebuddies, Gen, Implied/Referenced Torture, Not How the Force Works, Post-Canon, Rescue Missions, Snark, Synesthesia
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-01-07
Updated: 2017-06-07
Packaged: 2018-05-12 10:22:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 21,848
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5662801
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/salamanderinspace/pseuds/salamanderinspace
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Since her training began, Rey has been intent on finding her way to the Force.  That's why, even though she is still an apprentice, she follows Poe Dameron on an errand to rescue a mutual friend.  When they walk into what looks like a smuggling operation, Rey's instincts tell her that something else is happening, something more.</p><p>A Jedi must learn which instincts to trust.  And which friends to trust.  And which enemies.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Turquoise

**Author's Note:**

> This is hoping to be a very plotty action-adventure story with heavy emphasis on Rey. Hmu on tumblr: salamanderinspace (personal) or millicentthecat (SW)

***

**The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.  
(H. P. Lovecraft)**

 

***

When the sleek T-70 Fighter first landed on Ahch-To's moon-drenched shore, it occurred to Rey that the tattered figure leaping from the cockpit was probably a Resistance pilot.

For this reason, Rey hid.

She tucked herself into the nearest crag of rock, blending into shadow. It was the dead of night, first moon nearly at apex over the ruin of the last Jedi temple, and Rey had seven more trips to make before morning. Her back and shoulders ached. She was determined to complete her daily exercises, the last of which was slogging pails of water over the island from the well by the shore to the cave at the summit. The bodily pain this caused was, supposedly, motivation to hone her telekinesis; so Master Skywalker had said, and so Rey believed. He'd also said that lifting stones and doing handstands would sharpen her skills to a point, so that is what she did, every day, no exceptions. Additionally Master Skywalker had mandated that Rey complete her education in total isolation. _Of course_ she'd been curious about Finn, and about news from the front lines, but she'd been suppressing those thoughts, trying to focus. Such was the extremity of her solitude--deeper, even, than on Jakku--that the searing winds of Ahch-To had been the only noise she'd heard in twenty days. Skywalker spoke mind-to-mind, in silence--if ever he spoke at all.

The unknown pilot called out from the shore. "Hello? Is anyone there?" 

Rey had been pushing her mind and body since sunrise. Her breathing was fast, her muscles screaming. More than this, she ached with the weight of her loneliness. The burden of isolation settled heavier on her shoulders than any pail of water she'd toted up any number of stairs. She knew she should not allow this visitor to distract her from her regimen. She needed to become a Jedi Knight; it was her personal mission to hunt and destroy the remnants of those First Order _creatures._ If necessary--and Master Skywalker said it was necessary--she would live like a hermit and drag the oceans dry to prove her readiness.

She silenced herself and listened. Footsteps fell on the gravel trails down the slope.

Rey hadn't been expecting a visitor. She certainly didn't expect him to wander around in the dark calling out to her. "Skywalker? Luke Skywalker? Rey? Anyone? I know you're here, I used the map!" His speech was quick and sharp, like a man so accustomed to his confidence that he kept it, always, even in the face of danger. Rey could feel his presence strum the Force like a chord on a lute: a harmonious sound, at once playful and mournful. It flooded the palette in her mind she'd been using to sort out her new senses. _He's a bright turquoise kind of person,_ she thought. _Rare but natural._ She yearned to run and meet him so she could ask after Finn and Leia. Instead, she pressed her back hard into jagged stone and summoned the Force like a cloak of shadow-grey dusk. If the stranger wasn't too intent, he wouldn't be able to see her. 

"Come on! I'm reading your life signs!" The stranger shouted. "You know, I can do your horoscope, too, if you come out and chat!" Rey flinched, wary. _What if he wakes Master?_ Not very likely; the intruder was still about a hundred stone steps beneath the little den where Skywalker slept. Even so, Rey wondered if she should just send him away. She stepped out of the shadows and thought herself visible again. Not ten steps hence, the stranger startled. "Oh, hey! Wow, there you are. You're Rey?"

"Announce yourself!" Rey barked, and the man startled again. "Are you Resistance?"

"My name is Poe Dameron, and yes," said the stranger quickly. Rey recognized the name: _BB-8's lost companion._ Squinting, Rey found that she could feel the pilot's energy: an aura of masculine confidence, and beneath that, anxiety. It was a small anxiety, though--more embarrassment than fear. "I've been looking for you," he spouted. He stepped into a patch of moonlight so Rey could see him clearly; his tan skin glowed with a thin sheen of sweat and humidity. His grimace projected authentic concern. "Finn's in trouble."

"Finn?" Rey's chest tightened. Her resolve wavered. "What kind of trouble? And why have you come to _me?_ " The Resistance med-team had assured Rey that Finn would make a full recovery. It had seemed likely, too; miracles were possible on developed worlds, where money and technology came together to heal most damage. In extreme cases, there was bacta, which surely could have put Finn back on his feet. Rey had also envisioned that she would meet Finn again, soon, and that he would be healthy and safe. _Could I have been wrong?_

"We got ambushed," Poe answered. "I don't know who it was, but they got him. I need you to use Force voodoo to find him. "

Rey's pulse sped. _If those monsters took Finn..._ "Who told you I do _Force voodoo?_ "

"Finn did. He talks about you all the time. Please, is there anything you can do?"

"What about the General? Can't she help?"

"I can't ask her." Poe rested one hand on the back of his neck and glanced around. "No one in the Resistence can know I'm here."

"What? Why not?" Rey stared him down hard until his confidence flickered. She watched his energy brighten around the edges, shining with the boyish guilt that he'd been stubbornly trying to hide. Suddenly, she knew. "Oh, I see. You were somewhere you weren't supposed to be."

"Not exactly. Well, ok, yes, exactly. Wow, so you can like, read minds?" Rey didn't know how to answer this, but she didn't have to. Poe must have anticipated her hesitation because he just kept talking. "Ok, look, I can explain. There's a curfew on the base to keep track of everybody. We went off-base, after hours, knocking around a couple of the new Fighters. Just to get extra target practice. It was, like, you know..." He bit his lip. "A male bonding thing."

"It was a _stupid_ thing," Rey scolded. Even as she said it, she knew it was exactly the sort of thing Finn needed. _He's been falling in line his whole life..._ Rey stifled the urge to panic. "You _must_ go to Leia," she said, evenly. "I can do nothing for you."

"There's no time!" Poe protested. "Look, please, I have to handle this, ok? I cannot disappoint the General right now." Rey thought of Leia, holding her tightly, grabbing her from the plane like a single drop of water anchoring a grain of sand. She wondered how Leia was dealing with...everything. Then Rey thought of Finn, lying face-down in the snow--and before that, his desperate announcement: _"we came back for you."_ No one had _ever_ come back for Rey. Perhaps, just this once, she was obligated to return the favor.

Rey glanced over the at the pails of water she'd set down. On Jakku, clean fresh water had been hard to come by. Now she was surrounded by water and she did not know which way to go. "You know I can't just close my eyes and point to a map, don't you? We'd need to go look for him."

"Yeah? I mean, yeah of course!" Poe nodded emphatically. "The Fighter is modified for tandem. I can take you to where it happened."

"Fine," Rey answered. "But _I'm_ flying lead. Speed is of the essence. My Master _cannot_ wake and learn that I'm gone." Rey could not imagine Master Skywalker's fury if she left Ahch-To before she finished her training. If there was one thing he'd stressed before accepting Rey as a student, it was the absolute importance of finishing what was started. For some reason, Master Skywalker had painted resignation as the worst possible crime, and Rey feared what justice he might dole out. In fact, Master Skywalker cut a rather intimidating shape onto her psyche. He was not like Han, who offered her a job the first day they met; Rey had to convince Skywalker to train her, to practically beg. He was cautious, brooding, withholding approval of Rey no matter what she accomplished. But he was powerful. Rey hadn't given up. She _would_ earn her accolades.

"Hey, the faster we find Finn, the happier I'll be," Poe agreed. "These guys got the drop on us. They didn't seem that tough, first blush, but I can tell you more once we're moving."

 _Practical._ "Go now," Rey said. They wound their way down the cliffs, scooting on loose rock and sliding in mud. Rey was accustomed to the treachery of the damp landscape; Poe was not, but he kept his feet. Rey was starting to pay him a begrudging respect when they arrived at the beached Fighter. A blinking light and a familiar tone cut through the darkness.

"BB-8!" Rey cried. "You left him in the ship!"

"I had to make him wait in the ship, in case it was dangerous."

This was the point at which Rey decided to trust Poe Dameron: because, as BB-8 mused enthusiastically in binary, when landing on a strange world in the dead of night to seek help from a famously independent Jedi padawan, _most_ people would've stayed in the ship and sent the droid.


	2. Green and Yellow

POE PROVIDED COORDINATES to a destination near D'Qar. They mapped out about four parsecs south of Resistance base. "That's where we were," he explained, "but you may want to pop out a little farther. It's an asteroid field."

"That won't be a problem," Rey answered. She punched the numbers into the navicomputer and engaged the hyperdrive. When the ship came out of lightspeed, she steered into the belt of battered rock with poise. "Kill the engines," she told Poe. The fighter slowly rolled into the pattern of gravitational fields; Rey guided it steady, like a seasoned pilot. _Like a dance,_ she thought, _just blend into it._

"Wow, nice!" Poe observed. "You should come fly for the Resistance. Not that we're flying much these days."

"Why not?" 

"Orders are to lay low until we determine the First Order's next move." He fidgeted impatiently. "I've been going nuts buckled down on base. Finn was, too."

Now that Rey was flying again, she could almost sympathize. The dashboard controls circled like a long-lost friend. They overflowed with custom modifications and exciting new toys. Ejection-capable seats meant no cushions, just lots of connecting belts and ties; Rey felt like the jet was literally strapped to her hips. She moved through the asteroid field and the fighter moved with her like a well-fit garment. Poe had provided an extra helmet, which settled snugly over Rey's knots of hair. Rey wore it with pride. She caught a glimpse of her profile reflected in the metal control panel, Resistance starbird symbol burning like a crown above her ear. It felt right.

The cockpit was cramped but comfortable. Rey hadn't spent enough time up-close with humans to learn which fragrances were popular in different sectors; if she had, she might recognize the scent of Yavinni spice-oil in Poe's hair. Her senses were sharp. Sweeping the ship past a cluster of rock, she tried reaching out into the field with her perception of the Force.

"He's definitely there. I can feel him."

"Finn? Where? I don't see anything."

There was something familiar. Rey sensed a cylindrical mass hovering due south and directly ahead. She could not see it. Asteroids appeared to slip in and out of the space it should occupy. Rey felt a pulse of lime-green energy resonate from the space. _Finn._ Finn was always lime-green, Rey's favorite, vivid and thriving like _life._ The color was saturate, almost edible, and easily recognized when it wasn't being shielded. Now, however, Rey struggled to pluck the wisp of green out from under a shield. It was not just a physical barrier, either; this was something wrought in the Force by an expert hand. 

Rey fiddled with the transponder and readouts while Poe looked on nervously. "There's definitely a ship," she said. "A big one. Venator Class, easy."

"My scope's negative. Nothing on the visual scanner...?"

"They're using Force-cloaking: the same technique I used to hide myself from you on Ahch-To, but on a grand scale. It's a variation on the Jedi mind trick. Someone very powerful is hiding."

"Is it the First Order?"

"No. Someone else." Rey could tell. Whenever she sensed Stormtroopers, they looked muted, like soldiers lost in a dense cloud of grey smoke. Rey searched her feelings and found a full spectrum of energy within the mysterious ship. She'd seen fewer colors in the pocket of an LED fence at Niima Outpost. Apart from Finn's green, she couldn't isolate a particular person; it was all too much, too bright. _Who are you all? What are you up to?_ "Tell me about the ambush. What happened, exactly?"

Poe debriefed the details like he was giving a report to command. "Finn was flying an identical T-70-T about .35 ahead of me. We were doing drive-turns on a wrench of eighteen, maybe nineteen degrees. Then, all of a sudden, he started to pick up speed. He shot behind one of these meteors and never came out. Just disappeared, ship and all. I tried him on comm. No response. Like something swallowed him."

"Whatever it is, it doesn't want to be found." Rey swung the control stick left to avoid an oncoming wave of asteroids. "I'm guessing Finn got too near, so they grabbed him with a tractor beam."

"Is he ok?" Poe asked. "I mean, can you tell if he's...?"

"He seems fine. But we need a plan." 

"We should search for their radio frequency," Poe suggested. "They could be smugglers or one of the big Guilds. Maybe we could reason with them? Promise to conceal their location if they let Finn go..."

"Or threaten to blab if they don't," Rey countered. "Hold tight for a minute. I'm going to put out a hail to the rest of our fleet."

"What fleet?"

"The one these potential smugglers are going to _think_ we're scouts for."

"Ahhh," Poe mused. "Clever. I think I'm going to like you..."

Unfortunately, neither of them had long to bask in appreciation of Rey's cleverness. A veritable storm of rock and debris washed toward the small vessel. "Heads up!" Poe barked. Rey had been reaching for the signal transceiver; she grabbed for the steering column and pulled up hard, twisting the ship into a spin. BB-8 let out a series of alarms and warnings.

"I got it!" There was an electrical noise as Poe fired two quick blasts, carving a hole in the wall of spinning asteroids. If he hadn't struck at the _exact_ moment he did, Rey realized, the ship would have been pulverized.

"Oops," she conceded. 

"Hey, don't worry about it. Guessing you haven't flown in a while?"

"No, sorry." Rey silently cursed her lack of focus and vowed to do better. _Are you trained in the Force, or aren't you?_ She repressed the throb of self-doubt and evaluated the damage of her mistake. "Do you think they've noticed we're here?" 

Poe tensed as the ship began listing forward ever so slightly. "Oh, yeah. They've got us."

Rey tried firing the starboard engine but it was too late. They were caught in the inescapable pull of a tractor beam. Of course, quitting was not in Rey's nature. "I'm going full speed reverse. Get ready to jump to light speed."

"Whoa there!" Poe objected. "This isn't the Millennium Falcon! We'll be torn apart if we go into hyperspace with a shackle on us."

"Right..." Rey racked her brain for a new plan. Each passing moment they drew closer to the invisible thing. _Well, two can play at that game._ "Alright. I'm going to use the Force to make us invisible to them."

"Seriously?" Poe lifted a skeptical brow. "Like, the whole jet?"

"No, I don't think so. The trick only works when people don't know what they're looking for. They know we've got a jet but they don't know there's two of us, or what we look like." Rey pooled every ounce of her newly-cultivated ability. She dipped herself in the Force like a candle into wax. Then, she let that sense of warmth, of fluid energy, coat the whole interior of the cockpit. "There," she told Poe. "They won't be able to see us. Just an empty ship."

"Nice trick," Poe mused. "Although, I was kind of leaning on my good looks and charm as a strategy. What were you thinking?"

"Wait 'til they open the canopy and start blasting," Rey answered. "They won't fare well against an invisible enemy." 

A subtle grin curled at the corner of Poe's mouth. For some reason, Rey thought of a phrase she'd heard once: _risk junkie._ Then he got serious. "What if they scan for life signs? And well, I don't wanna limp your lightsaber, but _we can't see them either._ "

"Have you got a better plan?" Rey asked. "Just wait. I sense the threshold is near." A door was opening in space, revealing the meek fluorescence of a hangar bay. Rey killed the engine as they approached. "Do you see it?"

"Maker," Poe swore. "I see it." He wriggled in his seat uncomfortably. "This whole thing doesn't give you, like, a bad feeling?"

Rey deliberately ignored the question. "Listen. If we're separated," she advised. "You get Finn and get out."

"Finn wouldn't like leaving you behind."

"Finn isn't running this operation, we are," Rey said. "You came to _me_ for help. Do you trust me to look after myself?"

Light flooded the cockpit as the ship moved into the hangar. Rey discovered Poe was studying her, a smile of understanding fixed upon his chiseled, starfighter-jockey features. His energy flared with a certain bravado. "Yeah. Yeah, I do. Alright, let's do this." He unbuckled his belt to reach across Rey, seizing his rifle from its charging slot. Rey wondered how long he'd been on Jakku. He didn't seem like the type to sit tight and wait for his people to retrieve him. _Did you cut a deal at Niima? Do you know Unkar Plutt?_ Rey almost asked. Then she felt the landing gear touch down and there were more important matters to attend.

A blast of warm air filled the cockpit as the pressure adjusted to docking. Rey's skin, goose-bumped from the crispness of space, took a moment to acclimate. Rey observed the size of the structure around her with awe. She had rappelled through leviathan wrecks on Jakku; none were so vast or so beautiful as this alien docking bay. Freighters, shuttles, and fighters of every make and model were housed on levels along the wings. Some were old and decrepit. Some were freshly landed, preserved mid-repair or refuel. Most of the craft looked like TIE fighters but there was a lone T-70, brand new, standing dark in the center of the warehouse. _Finn's jet,_ Rey thought with a frown. All the ships--even those being serviced--stood empty, completely unattended. Rey strained her eyes for any sign of a mechanic or deck officer. There was no one. _Scavenger's paradise._

Radial lines scored the floor and ceiling; Rey's eyes dallied along them into distant shadows. Minutes ticked by as the tractor beam inched their X-Wing down the middle circle of the main aisle. Finally, the fighter slid to a complete stop. It was positioned centrally, with the main entry port behind them and three massive doors on their starboard side. These were numbered, as if leading to auxiliary hangars. Poe and Rey held their breath through a wash of eerie silence. Eventually, Rey heard Poe exhale. An uncomfortable moment passed.

"Is anyone coming?" Rey whispered. She removed her helmet to see more clearly. Her perception of the living Force was wholly applied to keeping them cloaked.

"Not that I see," Poe replied. "Should we just wait?"

Rey knew Master Skywalker would advocate patience. Of course, he would also be livid when he learned that she'd left Ahch-To. Rey stifled a sudden yawn; it occurred to her that sunrise on Ahch-To drew closer with each passing moment. "We haven't got all night."

"Right. Well, your words: _get Finn and get out._ " Poe decompressed the cockpit and unbolted the security locks. The armored canopy-hatch popped open with an inviting _whoosh._

Rey's nostrils filled with machine scents--the familiar churn of expired tibanna gas and rust. She found it deeply comforting. Beneath that smell, however, was something organic, something foul. She unbuckled her many belts and straps and climbed from the craft as quickly as possible.

The floor was dirty. _Dusty._ A few sets of tracks led off toward the far corner. Poe was already following them, leaving his own footprints in the grit. Rey pushed deeper into the Force again to conceal their trail. She could feel herself growing tired, still aching from her day of training exercises. _Focus. Do more. You can do it. It's already done._

As luck would have it, the tracks led straight to a set of double doors, nearly invisible as they blended into the dark metal of the walls. Poe gestured to the magnetic lock. Rey understood. She jogged back to the T-70, unsaddled BB-8, and brought the astromech to work on the door. In no time at all, Rey and Poe were crouching silently on either side of the doors, weapons ready. BB-8 popped the lock and the doors opened.

There was a hallway. Then another hallway. _This is too easy. Where is everyone?_ She let the Force-cloak slip for just a second so she could sense for Finn. He was there; green, pulsing nearby. _This way,_ she signalled to Poe. They ducked into a little chamber, turning into the open archway of a cell bay control room. The same awful smell lingered. BB-8 grabbed Rey's attention with a disgruntled chirp. "I cannot open the cell bay doors," was the translation. "They require a password."

Poe tapped her on the shoulder and mouthed something. _Use the Force?_ She shook her head. _No. I can't. But I can use this._ She drew her lightsaber. Then three things happened all at once.

A loud "bang!" echoed through the control room. Rey, startled, dropped both her lightsaber and her focus. She felt the Force-cloak waver as she lurched down to pick up her weapon. She knew, even as she shifted her balance, that this was the last thing she should do. She should warn Poe, or pull him behind a console to hide, or just meet the ship's crew head-on and announce herself. She should _not_ crouch down on the ground like an armed intruder caught breaking into the cell bay.

And yet.

She would rather be armed and concealed than the opposite.

The lightsaber rolled beneath a cabinet workstation. Rey dove, hand closing around the hilt just as three men burst into the control room. They were dragging a fourth, who was--Rey felt her heart stop, then start again at a frenzied pace--unconscious, gagged and bloodied, with his hands in binders behind his back. Rey dropped to her stomach on the floor behind the console. It was a perfect vantage point.

"Hey! Who the hell are you?" buzzed one of the newcomers. He was Rodian, stocky and reptilian, with hands wrapped around a long-barrelled blaster rifle. His round bug-eyes were fixed on Poe, who stood frozen, tensely evaluating the situation.

"It's a Resistance pilot," huffed a second man. This one was human: a short man, with several enhancements in the way of robotic limbs. He was dressed as a deck officer and wore an overstocked tool-belt. He looked out-of-sorts, which Rey found encouraging.

"A pilot? The one from before?" The third man was less of a man and more of a Hutt. He slurred out the question in a sloppy Huttese; he was, undoubtedly, the source of the grotesque smell. "I thought we locked him up!"

"No, this is an entirely different one," said the Rodian. He turned to the prisoner lying gagged and bloodied on the floor and gave it a kick. "Now see what you've done! Your pathetic escape attempt distracted us. We've got this Resistance pilot walking around." 

"My name is Poe Dameron," Poe said, levelly, with admirable calm. "I don't want any trouble. You waylaid my ship with your tractor beam. Now I'm looking for my friend, who, I believe, is captive on your ship."

As of that moment, no one had spotted Rey. She slowly, carefully pushed herself onto her hands and knees; this gave her a better view of the frightened prisoner. He was beginning to rouse. Lifting his head, he looked around, his swollen eyes only just starting to focus. His gaze settled on Rey, who was blindsided by a terrible epiphany.

The prisoner was Kylo Ren.

He was practically unrecognizable. His left eye was bulging out of its socket; his dark hair was matted with blood. A scar cut across his face, but it was subtle compared to the fresh bruises. He was bruised _everywhere._ He'd been stripped down to undergarments, every pale part of him marked by signs of recent torture. The right flank of his ribcage was mangled; Rey could hardly pick out the scars from Chewbacca's crossbow. His chest swelled and shuddered frantically with each breath. Rey could feel his pain, confusion, shame. She was overwhelmed by the sudden realization that there was barely any life force left in him.

 _Good. That's what you get._ The thought came with a surge of anger. In fact, a very real part of her wanted to see Kylo Ren beaten to a pulp. After what he did to her? After what he did to _Han?_ Rey was certain he'd earned his death. Just one thing disturbed her: the hue of the Force she saw rolling off his bruised, blood-spattered body. The energy was pale gold, like a young star. When Rey first met Kylo Ren in the forest outside Maz Kanata's watering hole, his aura had been orange, like fire. Later, when Han Solo confronted "Ben" on a bridge at Starkiller base, that orange degraded with the last rays of the dying sun; deeper and deeper into red. Now, Kylo Ren--or Ben Solo, whichever he was--flickered down like a candle about to be extinguished. Yellow. Rey had never seen someone change tones like that. It left her uneasy. 

"Rey?" Ren murmured in her general direction. The plea was so soft, so quiet. No one else heard it.

"Gilma," the Hutt intoned, "take this pilot and put him with the other one we scooped up tonight."

"No..." Kylo Ren let out an unexpected groan. His voice was hoarse and dry. "Don't let them take you. Kill them!"

Gilma, the Rodian, aimed a kick at Kylo's jaw. It connected with a sickening _crack._ Ren appeared to swoon, on the verge of passing out again. Gilma aimed his blaster, pointing at the pathetic creature on the floor, then seemed to think better. Gilma turned the weapon on Poe. "You sure we should be locking up Resistance pilots, Brantre?"

The Hutt--Brantre, by Rey's reasoning--belched out a long, low, revolting laugh. "These pilots are handsome and strong. I should like to taste them!"

"Enough of that!" snapped the deck worker. He looked positively unsettled. "We're letting them go. It's bad enough what I watched you do to _this_ one." The deck worker pointed to Ren, who clutched his chin and seethed, trembling.

"This one is First Order scum!" said Brantre the Hutt. He laughed again. The air went thick with the stink of his breath; Rey felt nauseous. "There are no rules about First Order scum!" Rey watched Brantre's long, worm-like tail nudge along Ren's injuries. She could almost feel it. No, she _could_ feel it; some dark corner of her nervous system was dialed into Ren's, vibrating with that dim yellow light. For just a second, she saw into his head. He'd come here on a mission, looking for something, but there was a problem with his extraction. He'd been on the ship for days. No one knew his location. Starved and desperate, he'd made one last attempt at freedom. He had failed, and his failure earned him his death. He did not fear it. He only felt isolated, adrift in a desert of yellow dunes at the onset of night, _lost_ and miserably thirsting, too wild and ashamed to seek for his own salvation. Rey felt words cut through the befuddled haze of emotion. _Don't look at me. Not like this._

Brantre's torture continued. Ren struggled to breathe; Rey struggled with him. "Just _kill_ me," he gasped. The demand was met with Huttish laughter. Brantre's tail crept along, pushing Ren to the floor, snaking his bare stomach. When a grey, slimy tongue slipped out of the Hutt's mouth, Rey stifled a scream. The deck worker took a tiny screwdriver from his belt and began to fiddle rather intently with one of his prosthetics. He wasn't going to ask Brantre to stop the molestation--he just wasn't going to watch. Poe remained reticent, held up at the point of Gilma's rifle.

Early in Rey's training, Master Skywalker had pressed Rey to discuss the duel with Kylo Ren. "I could see in his head," she'd admitted. "I could feel what he felt, and he could feel me. Like we were one." He'd paused before replying: "All things are one in the Force. Sometimes, however, we must learn to exclude." Isolation exercises, he'd said, would improve her control. For these, Rey stood waist-deep in the ice cold waters of Ahch-To, learning to shut out the cold with her mind. She stayed there, the moon rising to peak and falling to shatter, her body shivering and seizing until she thought she would die. Finally, with great pain and exhaustion, Rey was able to separate herself from her surroundings. Rey considered drawing on this lesson to sever her link with Kylo Ren. The memory of cold, harsh water chilled her blood. Of course, Brantre's ministrations were equally chilling. She refused to tolerate them.

 _Just one thing to do, then: fight back._ Rey crouched down and tightened her muscles. Calling upon weeks of agility training, she prepared to spring. In one swift motion, she ignited her lightsaber and leapt out like a bolt of lightning. A single spin put her at Brantre's throat, weapon held high in threat. "Sorry to interrupt," she said, "but we're actually in a bit of a hurry. WHERE is the other pilot?"

Brantre the Hutt let out a roar. "Lasqa, sound the alarm!" he grunted. "Call the might of Y'aille Brut down on this Jedi!"

Lasqa the deck officer looked petrified. "I will not! We have no quarrel with the Jedi." He raised his robotic hands and gave Rey a distressed wave. "You don't understand. You and your friend are in no danger from us! We will gladly let him go!"

"Then _why_ did you take us prisoner _to begin with_!" Rey bellowed.

"You were caught in a net!" Lasqa explained. "It was not meant for you. We needed it to catch this _urlahu_ , who is sought by our master..." Lasqa gestured to Ren, who lay motionless on the floor. "Our station operates mostly via droids and computer processes. We did not mean to take you hostage."

Rey had gut-instincts, honed at Niima Outpost; she knew the sound of junk peddling junk. She didn't need Jedi training to sense a half-truth in his words. "I see. And how many others have you _accidentally_ taken prisoner?"

"None! I swear it! Look for yourself, Jedi!" Lasqa shrilled. "Gilma, _please_ show this young Jedi the brig and retrieve her friend!"

"No way!" Gilma chittered. "I ain't gettin' within two squats of that lightsaber."

Rey exhaled and lowed her lightsaber. " _I'll_ stay here," Rey dictated. "You bring Finn to us. And turn off your tractor beam!"

Gilma looked to Brantre, who gave a reluctant nod. The Rodian headed for the command console, stepping over a ghastly smear of Ren's blood along his way. _Beep beep beep._ Gilma keyed a password in for the cell bay doors then edged toward them, careful not to step too close to Rey. He passed through the doors. The sound of his footsteps faded away. 

Rey sucked in a breath as the room grew quiet. She had many questions. What was a Hutt doing in this part of space? Who did Lasqa call master? What business did they have with the First Order, and with Kylo Ren? Rey nearly voiced this last query but she didn't want to press their luck. _Get Finn and get out._ She reached out for Finn's energy and felt him brightening, getting nearer. She withdrew, and in the ebb and flow of the Force, her senses found Ren. She felt his awareness waking, grabbing onto her consciousness. "They won't let you go," he whispered desperately. "Kill them. Kill them while you can."

Rey bit her tongue. _Murder isn't really my field,_ she thought at him, angrily. _And **don't** tell me I need a teacher._

Apparently immune to the awkward silence, Poe turned to Rey and attempted to strike up a conversation. "So how's all that Jedi training going? When do you get to the level where you _don't_ drop your lightsaber when you hear a loud noise?" He flashed a smile that would melt the poles of Hoth. 

Rey stared daggers at him. "Yeah, my mistake, how _clumsy_ of me. Next time you need help you should really ask the General."

"Point taken."

Gilma reentered the room with Finn in tow. Rey's breath caught when she saw how well he'd recovered; there was no sign of the burn he'd sustained on Starkiller Base. He looked _amazing_ in his orange jumpsuit--handsome and vibrant, despite nervous sweats and an anxious, darty-eyed pout. "Poe? _Rey?!_ " It was a joyous reunion; unexpectedly, Finn's eyes filled with tears. 

"What's wrong? Did they hurt you?" Rey snapped, purposefully.

"No," he answered. "No, I'm fine. I'm just so happy to see you guys," he gushed.

"Hey now," Poe soothed, "Let's get out of here. You can tell me everything the minute we hit space." Finn sniffled, and beamed at him.

"Now look! No harm done!" Lasqa interjected. "We can all just get on with our lives, yeah? Like it never happened. I'll buzz down some droids to escort you back to your ships..."

"That won't be necessary," Rey announced. "We'll be on our way." She righted a chair she tipped over when she sprang at Brantre and whistled to BB-8. The little droid rolled out from hiding. They departed into the hall, retracing the route to the hangar. Only when she sighted the two T-70s, just where they'd been left, did Rey shut off her lightsaber.

"All things considered, this went off pretty smoothly," Poe told Finn. Rey marveled at the truth of this. _I might actually get home before sunrise,_ she thought, though she hated separating from Finn so soon. She wondered how Master Skywalker would react if she told him the truth. Yes, she'd gone on an errand to help a friend. She'd given in to her attachment to Finn; this was forbidden for a Jedi. But wasn't it worth it? Poe was helping Finn to his jet, murmuring a private joke into his ear. Despite Lasqa's claims of innocent intent, Rey was pretty sure they'd rescued Finn from...something. It had cost them nothing. After twenty days in solitude, connecting with Finn and Poe left Rey feeling dizzy, almost elated. _And yet..._

That paltry yellow energy. That mess of bruises. Wasn't there something in the Jedi code about compassion? Or forgiveness? And what about General Organa? Was there anything left of her son? 

If it had been good to come back for Finn...wasn't it also good to rescue Ren?

"Kriff!" Rey swore.

"Rey?" Finn looked back with concern. "What's the matter?"

"I can't do it. I can't leave him."

"Leave who?"

"Kylo Ren! Kylo kriffing Ren!" Rey groaned with considerable distress. She resumed a reluctant hold on the hilt of her lightsaber and turned back toward the control room. "I can't leave him here to die like this. I have to go back."

 _"What?!"_ Finn said. Rey thought his eyeballs might pop from the stress. "No! _Really?_ " Rey glanced at Poe and could see him deciding whether or not to argue. He didn't take long, but he didn't look happy.

"Ok. We'll fire up the fighters and wait."


	3. Yellow

REY DARTED BACK down the hall. She zipped through the doors, still open behind her, like a fly through the blades of a fan. _They must lock on a delay._ That'd be convenient for a station with limited staff, droid _or_ human. But if the station was so thoroughly automated, what accounted for the rainbow of presence Rey sensed during the approach? There had to be at least a hundred human passengers holed up _somewhere._

When Rey reached the control room it was empty. Blood on the floor told of Kylo's violent journey back to cell bay; he appeared to have been hastily dragged, but not beaten. Rey presumed that the three-man crew must've hurried back to the bridge. She sensed for Brantre's leaky, pink sort of energy and felt it: two decks above, with Lasqa and Gilma nearby.

Rey stepped gingerly over a trail of crimson. The heavy, password-protected doors to cell bay yawned darkly open. Rey slipped herself through before they could time out and lock down. She let out a little gasp.

She'd entered a space that was half zoo, half dungeon. Her first thought was of livestock smugglers, but the technicolor energies vibrating off beings of all shapes, sizes, and sorts told her that the prisoners were mostly sentient. Energy fields lined either side of the hall, keeping the inmates hidden and blocking off cells. Rey couldn't see through the swirl of red light but she knew they were there: fifty, maybe sixty intelligent lifeforms. She could hear them, _smell_ them putrefying in long captivity. Rey tasted the smell of unwashed death. _Perhaps Brantre wasn't so odorous, after all,_ she thought, edging into minor hysterics.

The length and curve of the hall prevented Rey from gauging capacity. Rey flicked on her lightsaber, it's soft hum overwhelmed by the bright buzz of surrounding energy fields. Rey tip-toed, slowly at first, down the contoured aisle, creeping like a mouse in a centrifuge. She sped up as she rounded the circle and very nearly walked smack into a security droid. With a the ease of a Jedi, Rey cut it down. She dismantled the parts to assure it could not send a signal announcing her intrusion.

Rey picked up her pace. The cells went on and on; she searched each one with her Force-sight and found many empty. It occurred to Rey, somewhat horrifically, that Finn had been kept there. She hoped he was exchanging stories with Poe, and that they'd take Finn's testimony of this experience straight to the Republic, or at least, to Leia. _Whatever this is, it can't possibly be legal._

In about thirty paces Rey reached the end of the corridor. She was reasonably certain that Kylo Ren was in the very last cell. Or at least, she thought so. Her eyes were beginning to burn; not in the wet space between her eyelashes, but in the inner space, the inside-eye that looked for colors and energy. She was exhausted. She no longer felt Kylo's dim yellow pulse through the energy fields. She was now tracking him by droplets of blood and footprints on the unclean floor. Eyes cast down, she happened onto something of great significance: a metal seam in the brutalist facade, low on the wall by a power outlet. _The fuse box._

Rey dropped to a crouch and wedged a nail into the durasteel seam. She pried the cover from the portal, revealing a row of color-coded switches. They weren't labelled and there was no time to try each fuse. _What does it matter? Free everyone._ She crooked her arm to the elbow and swept every fuse at once. 

The hall instantly pitched into total darkness. 

The energy fields shut down, but so did the overheads. There was no emergency lighting. _WHY is there no emergency lighting?!_ Rey squinted past her lightsaber, the blue-white beam washing everything out while her pupils adjusted. She tried to use Force-sight; almost immediately, Rey sensed something wake. A low, gurgling kind of screech could be heard from one of the cells.

Still half-blind, Rey hurried to where she imagined Kylo was. She found him slumped on the floor of his cell, eyes closed, hands still in binders behind his back. His wounds looked clotty and horrid. Rey could tell from the unspooled splay of his limbs that he'd been drugged. _Or he's lost too much blood._ She tried to rouse him. "Kylo. Kylo Ren! Come on, wake up! We need to get moving before anyone comes to find us..." Rey fell silent when she heard a noise--a slithering, shuffling, coming closer. The foul smell emanating from the hall increased ten-fold. Rey tried to sense for the source and found she could no longer muster the focus. She didn't panic; even with no strength for cloaking, or any of her other Force stand-bys, she was pretty sure she could handle herself. On Jakku, she'd won almost any fight in a pinch. She knew she could rely on her wits and her senses. _Though, how much of that came through the Force...?_ Pushing to her feet, Rey took a deep breath, and peered out the door of the cell. "Hello? Who's there?" she yelled, and was met with silence and darkness. She backed over to Ren and knelt down, heart thudding wildly in the unwholesome quiet. He still would not wake.

It was around this time Rey's _wits and senses_ dissolved into terror. 

Although it was possible she'd left them behind in the hangar.

"Ren! WAKE UP!" Rey damn near squeaked. She laughed, giddy with the irony that Ren had, on their last encounter, tried to kill her. Wrapping her free arm around his body and holding the saber aloft with the other, Rey struggled to lift Ren's limp body from the cold stone floor.

"You're too heavy!" she grunted, dragging him a couple of yards. In the seclusion of training, she'd learned to speak out loud to herself, to manage her fear and keep her core muscles clenched. "I've been hauling buckets of water up a hill," she gasped, "in hopes of becoming strong enough to face him again." She was able to pull Ren through the cell door, where she paused to check the hall. It curved into darkness. With teeth ground, she lifted him again, inching around the curve. "I didn't think I'd literally have to be quite this stro---OOH!" Her words morphed into a scream as she saw them. _Creatures._ Some were small and smooth; others were large and shaggy and misshapen. Rey could barely separate their shapes, a tangled mob in the soft blue light from her lightsaber blade. 

She watched as, one by one, different aliens flooded blindly into the hall. Some headed straight for the exit, but most were collecting, crouching, prowling, gawking at Rey with a combination of fear and confusion. Rey considered greeting them, introducing herself, but it didn't seem appropriate. They all looked about as bad as Kylo did: starved, drugged, threadbare. She started to back away, put the horde pressed toward her in a hungry, expectant heave.

"Go on!" Rey shooed them. "You're free!" She brandished her lightsaber one-handed, somewhat haphazardly. "Don't look at me. _I'm_ not the one who kept you here. I just opened the doors, I swear it!"

Rey's words brought confusion. Hesitation. "Where are they?" asked a small, lizardous being with massive eyes.

"Your captors? I...I don't know! I think you might find them on the bridge!" Then Rey had a thought. "Do you think you could go up and force them to disable the tractor beam? So we can fly out of the hangar and escape?"

The lizard-thing considered this. "We will do so," it said. "We will _all_ escape."

To Rey's surprise, the prisoners agreed with this declaration. Even the more sinister-looking beasts turned themselves to this undertaking. The awful tightness that'd gripped Rey's chest started to loosen. _They're escaping. Just like we are. Escaping._ Rey wondered if she should stop them to ask after the affects of whatever toxin they'd been dosed with. _Best not to press your luck,_ she decided, watching a particularly slimey group of horrors slide by.

When every last captive was gone from the hall, Rey resumed dragging Kylo. "Ren, you better wake up," she muttered. "My arms will fall off soon." He pressed on her like so much dead weight. As Rey neared the control room she had to stop and take a breath. Her strength was failing; she'd leaned hard on her body all day on Ahch-To, and her joints were giving out. She reached for the Force but couldn't pull anything together, couldn't get a foot-hold. It was all too tiring. She could hear the sound of her blood, beating in her ears. Then, all of the sudden, she heard something else, something coming up behind her.

Rey turned just in time to see it lurch: a rathtar, but in a sickly, slimey shade of white. There was simply no time to react, to evade the hail of tentacles coming full speed on. Rey braced herself for the sensation of razor sharp teeth. Instead, she felt something brush past her cheek; a warm wind, like the first sigh of a sandstorm before it rolls into total fury. The albino rathtar slammed back against a wall, curling under an onslaught of burning yellow energy. _Kylo's energy._ She looked at the man half-hanging from her arms and saw that his eyes were open. His hands still in binders, he had one shoulder slouched forward, directing a cascade of power. Rey suddenly saw into his head, a brief flash of feelings: he'd attacked instinctively, aroused from his trance-state when he tasted Rey's fear. He barely had the strength, at first, but as he destroyed the creature in front of them, he rode a wave of aggression into surge of stamina. He punished the rathtar for making them targets of its hunger. It twitched a few times, like a thing in pain, squelching under blast after blast of Force. Kylo was torturing it, dismembering it and devouring its pain. He liked doing it. It revived him.

"Enough!" Rey cried. "Let's move!"

With a nod of his head, Kylo tossed the rathtar into a cell like it was weightless. He seemed to have recovered just enough to stay conscious and was growing more lucid as he accessed the Force. _Great. Just great!_ Rey thought. _He's barely even awake and now he's a deadly menace._

Together they ran. They fled the cell bay, crossed the control room, and met a closed door in the corridor on the other side. "Stand back!" Rey cried. She smote the durasteel door with her lightsaber, slicing a hole big enough to squeeze through. An alarm sounded, but before it rang twice they'd reached the hangar. Rey tumbled out into the enormous docking bay, scanning for the two T-70s where her friends were waiting.

Only they weren't waiting. They were gone.

Rey nearly fainted dead. Finn and Poe were nowhere to be seen. The _jets_ were nowhere to be seen. Fresh tire tracks, appropriately sized for two X-wings, cut a runway in the dust from the center aisle to the launch.

"They left," she whispered. "I can't _believe_ they left without us..." Even as she said it, she remembered her words to Poe: _if we're separated, you get Finn and get out._ Of course he'd followed the plan. That's what any sane, practical person would have done: stayed focused on their objectives and looked after themselves. That's what Rey would have done: sensible, independent, scavenger-Rey, not this maniac who went on midnight errands for total strangers and _risked her neck for Kylo fucking Ren._ She shouldn't have expected them to wait around. _Sometimes people who care about you need to leave you behind._

Rey took a deep breath and collected her wits. "Come on," she told Ren, "we're stealing a transport."

The row of decrepit ships were mostly of imperial design. Rey passed up a couple light freighters and settled on a newer TIE fighter with a healthy-looking twin ion engine system. She figured that speed and maneuverability would be critical if they were going to escape. _If that's even possible._

"Not that one," Ren said. "Take the Corellian vessel."

"Why?" Rey glowered at him, suspicion aroused. "It's not like you'll be flying."

"You're not in any shape," he warned her. She wanted fire a witty "look who's talking" style comeback at him but she couldn't. Her head was swimming; she had no breath to spare. She found herself hitting every one of her physical limits for the night at once. She'd been riding a burst of adrenaline all the way from the cell bay; that was finally draining, leaving her cold and spent.

"Rey?" Ren's voice sounded distant, far off. He was regarding her nervously. 

"I saved your life," she panted. "Just get in the damn TIE fighter. I'll be there in a second." She just needed a second to catch her breath. She wouldn't take long. She just needed to breathe, to stop the hangar from reeling. She really needed to be able to fly. _A couple of deep breaths, just like during training: in, hold, out, hold. In, hold..._

Rey stumbled toward the fighter, darkness eating at the corners of her vision. She had a moment to find this familiar, to remember blacking out in the forests of Takodana with her ears full of blaster-fire and her eyes on a masked, armor-clad Kylo Ren. Suddenly she could feel him, pressing like a weight on her consciousness, guiding her. _No! Not again!_ She couldn't believe it. She couldn't believe he would choose THIS MOMENT to get the jump on her. _Stop letting him make you faint!_ she ordered herself. She tried to scream but no sound came. She had nothing in her to fight with. She was drifting, floating into a warm sleep, washed away in a halo of golden light.

She'd been training for weeks. In the end, it did no good. In one last burst of conscious thought, for some reason, Rey thought of practical Poe Dameron. She wondered how he'd known not to wait, how he'd known not to bother about the "First Order scum." _It's so hard to know,_ she mused, _when someone might help you._ Then she disappeared into dreams: wispy delusions of desert sands and coiled tusk-cats, yellow and savage, crying from the thorns in their paws.


	4. Orange

WHEN REY CAME to, she was lying in the darkened medbay of a defunct Coreillian freighter. She recognized the make and model; it was indeed the ship from the hangar, the one Ren had wanted, and, she could now tell, a former medical supply runner. 

Ren himself was nowhere to be seen. Rey could sense him on the ship--somewhere near the bridge, she guessed, and making his way toward her. Rey took a deep breath and found her body aching predictably. She felt for her lightsaber; surprisingly, it was nestled in the pocket of her tunic, safe and sound. _That's odd. Why would he let me keep my weapon?_

Rey took inventory of her condition. She was tucked under a light med-foil blanket, otherwise unencumbered. She felt restored but desperately thirsty; she was uncertain how long she'd slept. She measured her focus and wakefulness and found the Force at her fingertips. It cradled her synapses, feeding her the personalized variety of energy which she saw as a deep, steady blue. It was her very own shade of blue, her signature in the Force; she'd never seen it in anyone else, though Master Skywalker came close. To be fair, her ability to see the Force as colors was a pretty recent development. In fact, she'd used that particular skill--and all of her strange, mystical new abilities--more in the previous night than in the whole span of her training. She suddenly felt foolish for leaving Ahch-To, like the whole endeavor had been completely ludicrous. _At least Finn is safe._ Rey wondered if Finn was worried about her. And what of Master Skywalker? What would he think, when he woke and found her gone?

 _Oh no. What if they send someone to look for me?_ That would be the worst thing. Reluctantly, Rey tried to contact Master Skywalker through the Force, tried to broadcast a feeling of assurance. She couldn't send words, not so far, but she might be able to let them know she was safe, that she wasn't in any kind of trouble. _I'm really not. Not yet...I don't think. I'm not._ Before she could place enough faith in this litany to muster up a contact, Rey heard the soft pat of footfalls approaching.

"Rey? I'm coming in." Ren announced himself almost simultaneously to his entrance. He'd found himself clothes to wear: some kind of thin cotton surgical uniform, white and grey, light enough to make him look tan. His hair was damp and wavy, with a dark gleam and luster like polished glass. He was still blotting it with a towel, hiding his face, but Rey could see his arms and his neck. His bruises were gone. He was standing straight, or at least, with his usual restful slouch.

"There was bacta in storage. I used it all." Ren said. "I hope you don't mind. I was very injured, and I believe I may have been inadvertently siphoning energy from you." 

_Inadvertantly, my arse._ Rey had no idea if such a thing was possible, and she certainly wasn't going to trust his word. She was certain he'd knocked her out so that he could abduct her. _Again._ In addition to the improvements of his injuries, Rey observed a change in his energy. He glowed with the Force, his aura slowly returning to an exuberant orange. This, more than anything, set Rey on guard. "Where are we?"

"Still in the Ileenium system. You weren't out very long." Ren crossed the room and sank onto a duraplast chair. He tossed his towel to the floor and leaned forward, placing his head between his knees. The scar on his face was darker now, a more dramatic contrast to his pale skin and good looks.

Rey tried to see Han Solo in his face and couldn't. "Why did you bring me here?"

Ren looked up, surprised. "Why did I...?" He seemed both irritated and genuinely amused. "It was the first place I thought of, once we were clear of that hangar. I went to hyperspace as quickly as I could. We were lucky. The tractor beam must have malfunctioned."

Rey didn't see any reason to correct him. She wondered if he was telling the truth, if they'd really jumped to some random location near D'Qar in the haste of escape. They could be docked right outside a First Order base, for all she knew. Reaching for the Force, she pushed against his thoughts and found that their connection was still mysteriously strong. He was thinking of food. Rey could see his thoughts of yoba and goff-milk, could smell strange meat cooking in exotic spices. He was starving and there was nothing on board in the way of rations.

"I feel that," he cautioned her. "It isn't necessary." 

"That's for me to decide." Rey pulled back anyway, leaving his thoughts, watching her blue energy trickle away from him. As it went, it grabbed at the edges of his aura, almost taking a piece of him back to her. Something passed between them, something sharp and electric; she could feel him gasp, shivering a little. _Oh._ Perhaps, she thought, she shouldn't entirely dismiss the notion of...what had he said? "Inadvertent" siphoning.

Ren stiffened. "I plan to take us to victual at Carad'qa station," he announced. "You are to stay in this room."

Rey had to stop herself from snorting with laughter. "Or," she countered. "I could kill you and then go wherever I like."

"Later," he promised. "First you'll want to deal with this." He slipped his hand in the pocket of his robe and pulled out a portable holocomm radio. Tuning it to a common Republic frequency, he set it on the table near Rey's cot. A static squeal wobbled across the wire, gradually phasing into a spoken alert:

"Attention please, Attention please. Be on the lookout: all ships travelling within five parsecs of the Ileenium system." A stiff-speeched auto-jockey recited a staccato message. Rey had heard these broadcasts before; Unkar Plutt played music at his kiosk, sometimes, and he'd scan the BOLOs for information related to stolen vehicles. Sometimes whoever posted the message paid for it to play ten or twenty times before the music would come on.

"Missing, in the Ileenium system," the voice announced, "two humanoid males, one light and one dark in complexion, both piloting stolen T-70-T modified fighter jets, answering to Poe Dameron and Finn (no last name.) Please radio any information to one T. J. Pava at Carad'qa station. Message repeat queue: three remaining. Be on the lookout: all ships travelling within five parsecs of..."

Ren switched off the broadcast. "I know these men, these pilots," he said, a little rougher than necessary. "If I am not mistaken, they were last seen in your company, yesterday evening." He paused to assess Rey's reaction. "The Resistance is still seeking them as they did not return to base."

Rey hadn't even considered the possibility that something had happened to Poe and Finn. She felt as if the cot was slipping out from under her; like she might fall through the floor and into space. "The fighters were gone when we reached that hangar. They _must have_ made it out."

"I am afraid not," Ren declared. "Y'aille Brut has them."

"Who?"

"I tried to tell you. You don't listen." He stood, dragging himself to one of the medical supply closets adjacent to Rey's bunk. He opened the nearest cabinet and began to rifle through. Rey glimpsed his ribs beneath his shirt--they were healed, but too sharp, too obvious, as if he hadn't had a good meal since the destruction of Starkiller. "The Force is at work here, Rey. You think Brantre and his rag-tag traffickers could have gone up alone against the power of the Dark Side? Y'aille Brut is much bigger than you or I. It's much more." His tone was still soft, but he'd fallen into his habit of popping consonants for emphasis. He'd found a comb, and was brushing the blood and knots from his long, dark hair. Rey found this unbearably distracting, particularly during a crisis.

"Will you stop preening yourself and tell me who Y'aille Brut is?" she demanded.

"Not who. What. Y'aille Brut is the name of the syndicate," Kylo explained. "Or cult, if you prefer. They are certainly fanatics."

"Fanatic about what?"

Ren tossed the comb aside with some disgust. He resumed searching the nearby cabinets. "Destroying the First Order."

"But Finn and Poe have nothing to do with the First Order!" Rey sat up, throwing off the thin, foil med-blanket. She was suddenly hyper-aware of the fact that Ren must've carried her unconscious body aboard the ship and tucked her in. Rey watched him discover a case of something in storage, some kind of liquid. He broke one open, sniffed it, and took a sip. He made a sour face.

"Relax," he said. "We're going to get them. You and me. You're going to help me."

"What? Why would I help YOU?" 

"To save your friends. And because you already have. Because I needed you to." He extended his arm to Rey, holding out the bottle of drink he'd found. An offering. Rey was desperately thirsty; she took the bottle, took a swig, kept it down. "I am grateful for what you did," he said. "I want you to know there are no hard feelings about my grandfather's lightsaber." Rey felt her fingers go to the weapon at her side. _Her_ lightsaber. Ren's gaze followed her hand, then flitted away, like he'd looked on something shameful. "I don't even have my lightsaber," he murmured. "Brantre took it from me."

Rey felt her mind fill with a sharp recollection of Ren's tormentors: _"It's bad enough what I watched you do to this one."_ "Look," she said, trying to keep any trace of pity from her voice. It wasn't hard. "You've been through a lot. You need real doctors. If we go to the Resistance--"

"You don't say what I need," he told her, sharply. There was fear around the edges of this statement, as if he was terrified that, somehow, it might not be true. Rey was a heartbeat from activating her lightsaber when she saw his energy start to mellow, his features going calm. "Listen. Your companions. The pilot and the traitor. The Resistance can't help you find them. I can. I know how to hunt these people. I know what to do. I _want_ to help. I _need_ to find Y'aille Brut and have my vengeance."

Rey didn't doubt that this was true, at least, the "have my vengeance" part. However, this didn't mean she felt even the least bit inclined to pal around the galaxy with Kylo Ren. "You're asking me to trust you," she said. "To team up with you-- _YOU_ \--over any one of the people who...have helped me." It was a short list, actually. With Finn and Poe gone, it was a very short list, and Ren knew it.

"You mean General Organa?" he said, resentment leeching through every word. "You see how invested she is. She's put out a radio broadcast. How thoughtful. How thorough. Or do you mean Luke Skywalker? Is that who you mean?"

"Yes. Luke Skywalker."

He smiled. "Fine. This craft has an ejector pod. Go to him. Go to Luke Skywalker and see how much he helps you find your friends."

"That's it? You're just going to let me go?"

"Yes. We're done." He stood, collected his radio and the bottles he'd scavenged, and stormed out of the room.

"Wait. WAIT." Rey felt a surge of confusion. Once again, it struck her just how little planning she'd put into this misplaced errand: rescuing her greatest enemy. She stood, unwilling to let him leave her sight. " _You_ don't say when we're done!" She followed him through the ship, which turned out to be smaller than she'd expected (but still much larger than the Falcon). Ren disappeared into a creaking lift, leaving Rey to rush the rusted staircase up to bridge level.

Rey was panting when she reached the upper deck. She transversed a corridor and found the bridge: small and dingy, more of a cockpit really. Kylo sat in the captain's chair, a big leathery station designed for command, illuminated by the small, harsh glow of a utility lamp. He hadn't bothered to get the main lights on. To his right, at the pilot station, about half the dashboard instruments were offline. The rest confirmed his vague intimations; they were indeed drifting on the outer edge of the Ileenium system. _He should really be watching the sensor array,_ Rey deduced. _And that pressure gauge. And--what the hell, Ren? Did you just leave the ship to idle along while you had a shower???_

"What's to stop me from taking you prisoner?" Rey blurted out. Kylo scowled, and she regretted the choice of words. "I mean, just, you know, taking control of this whole ship?"

He watched her silently for a moment, toying with something in his hands. On further examination, Rey saw it was the charred, broken pieces of the binders he'd been wearing. "So confident," he said, coolly. "So...combative." Rey's eyes filled with a vision: Kylo, Force-levitating her lightsaber to cut his binders off while she lay unconscious in dust. He'd burned his wrist badly, barely conscious enough to guide the lightsaber without shaking it. He used his arms to lift and carry Rey to the freighter's medbay. It had been painful. Even with the sedatives he'd been on--now purged from his system, finally, thankfully--her weight had been hell on his burnt and battered skin, his broken arm. He could just as easily have left her behind. He'd chosen to bring her. Rey's vision cleared. Instinctively, her eyes went to Ren's wrists, looking for traces of the injury. The marks were there, barely visible after treatment with bacta; they would leave scars. 

"I suppose," he said, "I am at your mercy. As you were, so recently, at mine."

"I don't remember you being exactly merciful," she said, "when you tied me down and demanded to know the location of the map to Luke Skywalker."

"The map is no longer my objective. You no longer stand between me and the battle I seek." He stood, his height overbearing in the small cockpit. Rey felt crowded, even though he was not within a pace of her, not nearly close enough to reach out and touch. She felt his energy rolling off him, burning orange like star-fire, the same as when she met him in the the woods of Takodana. That orange aura was one of the first she'd seen. It was a spectacle, then, real and bright and solid. She hadn't believed it. Hadn't thought he was human.

"When I came upon you in the woods," he said, sensing her thoughts, "it was you, Rey, who fired on me. You could have run. You could have surrendered. You could have bothered yourself to parley. You attacked in fear and made me your enemy. Do not do so again. Join me, or return to your Master."

Once more, Rey teetered on the verge of pulling her weapon. She wanted to scream at him. _**You** set yourself against the Jedi! Murdered your own father! And now you want to **parley**_??? But Rey wasn't going to lose her head again, not over Kylo Ren, not after her recent string of disastrous decisions. She had to make a choice, now: what would be the best way forward? What would a Jedi do? What would Master Skywalker advocate?

Rey relaxed her shoulders and unballed her fists. "You mentioned something about an escape pod?" she said, as calm and cavalier as possible. 

Ren smiled again, a little too smug. He was still casually fiddling with the binders, clinging to the shards of deformed metal. _Revelling in the reminders of recent destruction._ "On the way to the forward hold," he said. "Go back down the stairs and take a right. You'll find it." 


	5. Blue

Rey did find her way to the escape pod. It wasn't that bad off except that it was made entirely out of garbage. It was old, _really old,_ but it was equipped with a (questionable) hyperdrive and good reentry shielding. There was even a transmitter--broken, Rey soon discovered, though it wouldn't take her long to fix. She'd have a project for the trip back to Ahch-To.

Yes, she was headed back to Ahch-To. She would go as quickly as possible to Master Skywalker and confess every single detail of the trouble she'd gotten into. She was certain he could locate Finn and Poe and make everything right; whether he _would_ was another matter. Rey did a quick systems check, then strapped in. There was a convenient sub-airlock launch out the forward hold. "Ah, those Corellians," Rey muttered, finding the lever to release the airlock. "They did make things easy, didn't they?" Without even having to say another word to Kylo Ren, she was able to drop into space and get very far, very quickly. As Rey watched the medical vessel grow smaller and smaller out her viewport she felt her shoulders relax a little. Ren and his offer of cooperation disappeared gradually into a wash of void.

Rey waited to go to hyperspace in case Ren got it in his head to follow her. Even then, she punched the wrong coordinates into the navi-computer, hoping to evade a trace. The route would be long and a little meandering. She'd have time to think, to plan her next move _Not my strong suit,_ Rey acknowledged, _but I'll have to make due. That's what happens when you undertake mad rescue missions._ Though, now that she had her head on straight, she realized that it hadn't all been so mad. A kind of natural comfort found her; she was alone in a way she hadn't been since... _Since my last night on Jakku. Before any of this business with the Force began._ Outer space was a buffer, just enough to create an ambient privacy, an _unsaturate spot_ in the Force. It was like a breath of fresh air. She could finally take a moment to strategize.

On a basic level, Rey had never wanted to be a fighter. She was a scavenger: search and recover is where she lived and breathed. She'd learned to fight because, sometimes, when you find things, people want to take them from you. For instance, a lightsaber. Or a BB unit with a selenium harddrive. Or a confused ex-Stormtrooper with a desperate need to make a good impression. These were all things Rey had fought for, recently, but her ability to make and enforce her own claims dated back to childhood. Back then, every scavenger had a territory: a realm of things their own, as large and as small as they could defend against others. For Rey, this was the only type of ownership that could be real and lasting. She'd grown up as a kind of one-woman army, willing to maintain the sacred scavenger law of _Finders Keepers, Losers Weepers._ For this reason, tales of the Resistance had always charmed her. Resistance fighters were Finders on a galactic scale, seizing small trophies from the pocket of the more powerful First Order. Rey had wondered, as a little girl, if she might grow up to be a Resistance pilot, but it was never a goal so much as a fantasy. She'd pictured herself careening through the galaxy, laying claim to the Destroyers in the sky just as she did to the Destroyers in the sand. 

The only battle strategy she knew was _Finders Keepers, Losers Weepers._

Kylo Ren was a Loser in a big way. The more she learned of him, the more Rey knew this to be true. He'd had a family, once; he'd had a teacher, he'd had everything. She didn't know exactly what happened except that he'd given it all up to go to the Dark Side. Rey knew the Dark Side was always the losing side. She'd known not to give up the map when Ren strapped her down and interrogated her for it. He'd seemed scary at first, sure, but he didn't have the ability to strip someone like her of her haul; he just wasn't hard inside, like a scavenger. _And he's still taking it in the teeth, apparently,_ Rey thought, in regards to Ren's mission with Y'aille Brut. He'd failed to take them on just as he had failed to acquire the map.

Yes, Kylo Ren was a Loser. On some level, however, he was also a thing to be found. He was Leia Organa's lost boy, and Rey knew this, sort of parallel to the way she knew him as an enormous Loser. She wanted to fight him and she wanted to rescue him. She wanted to save him, and destroy him. Both things were right, and both were ok, because both maintained The Law. 

Except she hadn't really done either of those things. She hadn't had the heart to leave him with Y'aille Brut, bluntly facing his own failures as an ally of the First Order. Nor had she returned him safely to General Organa. She'd just left him behind, somewhere in the D'Qar system, unclaimed, uncashed, and unbeaten. She was giving him up to return to Master Skywalker. Was this the right choice? It had to be. She couldn't possibly do anything else. She needed the right kind of help to get Finn and Poe; they were the priorities. They were treasures. Finn and Poe were like the lining she'd retrieved from the rusted out bottom of an imperial mega-laser--the one she'd found on a scouting trip that caused her to instantly drop everything else she was carrying. It had been a precious find--still coated in Kyber crystal residue--and that's what Finn and Poe were. They were precious. 

Kylo, on the other hand. Kylo was...Kylo was the banged up air-tank compressor you pick up when you're waist deep in a pile of scrap metal, looking for something more valuable, because you're tired and it's there and you might as well take what's in front you, for whatever it's worth. _Sometimes that happens, when you're scavenging._ Rey just needed to go back and get the person she'd originally intended to salvage. Of course she was scared for Finn, and a little pissed at her own failure, but a scavenger has no time for feelings when enforcing The Law. Rey glanced at her instruments and did a quick check of the pod's navigational system. She was on the right path, literally and metaphorically. She was confident that, so far, she'd handled recent crises in the best possible way. There was only one thing really bothering her. 

_My lightsaber. Why didn't Ren take it from me?_

It was an action she could not understand or contextualize. Rey could only assume that Ren's personal philosophy did not account for _Finders Keepers, Losers Weepers._

Master Skywalker had been trying to introduce Rey to a larger philosophy. The Jedi Code was an abstract sort of doctrine; Rey had yet to internalize it, finding it much more complex than the instincts of a scavenger. She knew the basics: _there is no emotion, there is peace._. It was a big adjustment, and Rey wasn't there yet. There'd been a training exercise, specifically designed to break Rey of her unconscious and undisciplined adherence to the Law. Master Skywalker had assigned her to stand on the beach and sift through the stones and shells looking for fragments of milky sea glass. These were incredibly rare, Ahch-To not being particularly inhabited, and they were also almost identical to the quartz pebbles strewn throughout the sand. Rey spent three whole afternoons, plucking pebbles from the beach, examining them, and then throwing them away into the tide. Finally, on the third day, she picked up something smooth and sand-blasted and just a little too light. It had felt different in her hand. It was so sparkling, so perfect. She'd rushed to Master Skywalker positively radiating excitement. She'd run all the way down the shore to find him, lifting her arms to raise the glass so it could catch in the sun and glow like her sense of pride. _I found it._ He'd taken the pebble from her hand, examined it...

And thrown it into the ocean.

"There is no emotion, there is peace," he'd said. Then he told her to find ten more, and throw all of them away.

It hadn't really been Rey's idea to train with Luke Skywalker, not originally. Maz Kanata told her she should - _"the belonging you seek is not behind you ... it is ahead"_ \- and then there was the General. A singular conversation had transpired between Rey and Leia after the destruction of Starkiller Base. Finn was sleeping, and Leia came in, and she said, "How'd you like to learn a few moves for next time?" Rey said yes, of course. There was a fire in her, and she wanted the First Order to burn, and she wanted to pay Kylo Ren back a hundred times for the burns he laid on Finn. But she didn't say that to the General. 

She'd said, "yes, I think so, if you'll teach me?"

"Not me," Leia had replied. "Somebody tougher than me, even. And a _whole lot_ tougher than that snot-nosed kid of mine."

Then Leia explained what she had to do. She needed to convince Luke Skywalker to get back in the game. It was a fairly daunting task. It was also a recovery: a retrieval. _Finders Keepers._

Now Rey sighed. She sat back in the rusted out bucket seat of the escape pod and yanked at the twine that held her hair in place. With four--she glanced at the gauges-- _four and a half_ parsecs yet to travel, she figured she might as well get comfortable and attempt to meditate. She hadn't ever achieved deep meditation, but these memories of Luke and Leia were bound to take her somewhere. Closing her eyes, she let her own personal hue of Force envelope her until the sight of the dashboard disappeared under pure blue energy. Then, just like magic, she was outside herself; she was watching herself hitch a ride to Ahch-To with Chewie in the Falcon. Then she was in her body, again, but in the body of her former self. She was sitting right next to Chewie, reliving her very first descent to Ahch-To. The experience was lucid and immersive, like she'd passed through a cloud of amnesia. Rey saw the island from her dreams emerge, a speck rising out the the sea. It had no name yet. Rey had no idea what she'd find. She surrendered to an inveterate excitement. 

Climbing the cliffs was like finding something long lost. When she reached the pinnacle, an untidy man with a grey beard and mournful eyes regarded Rey with sentimental lassitude, as if he'd read the whole story of her life on her face and it wearied him. She held out the lightsaber--her lightsaber, Luke's lightsaber, _Anakin Skywalker's_ lightsaber--and suddenly, she found she couldn't say anything at all. Some very small part of her pondered over how many portions the heirloom talisman was worth.

There was a long silence. Rey heard the beating of a hawk's wings, the breaking of the waves. Then the man spoke. "So you're who they sent."

It was such an odd thing to say, in light of everything. It was as if he expected to be fetched--but then, Rey had known, even then, that Jedi could have visions of the future, so maybe he really was expecting someone. _Someone, but not me?_ Rey wondered if she should introduce herself by name or if he could pluck her name from her head the way she could see, in his mind, a raging storm, darkening everything. She knew he was Luke Skywalker. She decided not to announce herself. _Rey isn't even my real name, anyway._ Just something she chose. Something she found in the sand and kept 'cause it suited her.

"I wonder," Luke mused, "how did my sister convince you that the Resistance needs you?"

Rey shook her head, confused. She was still trying to make her mouth form words. "They need _you,_ " she answered.

"What do you think it is about me?" He smoothed down his robes, fixing them, then he pulled them back out of order. It was a small habit, so anxious and self-aware, as if he were uncomfortable wearing something so formless. "What is it that they need?"

Rey contemplated this. It was clearly meant to be contemplated. There were a dozen answers she could give, and they all felt wrong; she was freshly reeling, so soon after Han's death, and her mind was still addled. _Leia needs her brother,_ she thought, and she felt Luke hear it. She felt the words form in the space of his mind like writing in a heavy blue ink.

 _You know that isn't it,_ Luke thought back. It was a little alarming to hear his words in her head. _If that was it, she'd have come herself._

"You're the last Jedi," Rey said, out loud. "She needs your wisdom. Your...knowledge of the Force."

Luke swallowed a wry laugh, the kind that is barely suppressing a groan of agony. In a prescient moment of empathy--perhaps aided by the Force--Rey saw something behind his eyes: a temple, a massacre, a deep well from which all the blood in the world was flowing. "If I'm so wise, why can't you all just trust that I know what I'm doing?" he said. In the silent palette of her mind, she heard him whisper, perhaps by accident: _Ben never trusted me. He was so afraid that I didn't have what he needed._

Suddenly, overwhelmingly, Rey sensed Luke's profound loneliness. He was living with a kind of knowledge and responsibility that no other living person had. No one else could fathom it. She wanted to go to him, to take his hand and say "I'm here now," but she couldn't. The map had taken her to half a man; the legendary Luke Skywalker existed in pieces. Some part of him was in some other place, some metaphysical place, and she couldn't get there. She couldn't really go where he was without becoming a Jedi herself.

And so she would. She'd become a Jedi, and scavenge for the broken parts of him.

"I trust you," Rey announced. She said it loud and clear, feeling like the ocean would absorb her words if she issued anything less than a proclamation. "I'll do anything you say." She was still holding the lightsaber, then, gripping it. Her wrist had slackened a bit, but something in her posture was still offering it, still calling attention to its enormous value and implicit proposition. _This is the biggest thing to ever happen to me,_ she thought. She pictured all those little tally-marks on Jakku, the ones she'd scratched into the metal of her little shelter. _Everything has been leading up to this._

Luke looked out into the expanse of sky, spreading and reaching in every direction, and he stood so still for so long that Rey felt like he'd turned to stone. "Well, you might as well come in out of the wind, and have lunch," he said. And that was that. A few days later, he reluctantly agreed to train Rey as a Jedi, provided that she stuck with her training until he decided she was ready to face "the final test." 

Rey emerged from this memory as if from a trance. It took a few moments to orient herself. Gradually, her body grew aware of the Corellian pod and the cool, crisp temperatures of space. In fact, she was fairly certain she'd achieved deep meditation at last. _Will Master Skywalker be proud that I've done so?_ she wondered. _Or will he only be wrathful that I snuck out?_ Either way, she'd know soon enough. Her little journey into deep-think may have yielded no revelations--she'd seen the past, exactly as it transpired--but it had taken up a fair chunk of time. She popped out of hyperspace and found Ahch-To growing nearer, a little blue crumb outside her viewport. Rey snapped into full on "pilot" mode. The pod wasn't equipped to navigate in-atmo, so she needed to pinpoint her descent to the Jedi Temple or risk landing on the other side of the world.

She reached for the Force, making tiny, nuanced adjustments to guide her way to the island. She was starting to grow tired again, and thirsty. She half-wished she'd taken the time to grab a case of sour drink from the stores in the Corellian freighter. Despite the functional re-entry shields, the craft warmed on descent. Approaching a world with a dense layer of atmosphere was like puncturing a giant fireball; the gases cradling the planet trapped the sunlight and generated friction on objects hurtling in from space. Rey felt a bead of sweat form on her temple as the temperature gauges flicked from 70 to 80...then 80 to 90. Her wool vest and arm socks sweltered. She stripped them off and applied all her focus to piloting the pod around the curved horizon.

When the craft fell low enough that land masses started to be visible--just a couple little spots, scattered on a solid blue plane--the internal temp of the craft hit 110. Recent fainting sessions fresh in Rey's mind, she gave herself a pinch. Then the Overheat alarm went off. The heat, the noise, the descent--it was completely overwhelming. She started to have legitimate concerns about burning up.

"Well this is just making me anxious," she quipped at the blaring alarms on the dashboard. Within seconds, she'd rerouted power from the gauges to the shields. _No big loss. I don't need a bloody temperature gauge to tell me I'm on fire._ The extra shield-strength seemed to help; Rey could swear she felt a cool breeze. She hoped so, anyway, or else she was in big trouble.

Temple Island emerged on the far horizon. She'd be there in less than a minute. Summoning all her access to the Force, she seized the pod and directed it toward the conical hunk of rock. She let the craft swoop low, part-way into the water, to slow it down with a little extra drag. Steam and spray exploded in every direction, obscuring the viewport. Finally, Rey felt the pod slow to a stop with a terminal "thunk!" Wiping fog from the duraglass, Rey peeked out; fantastically, the pod had arrived on the sandbar along Temple Island's mildest shore.

_Perfect landing._

Rey popped the canopy and burst from the vessel, laughing with relief. It was late afternoon on Ahch-To, the only hour when the orange sun sank low enough to send rays of golden glow beneath the ever-present cloud-cover. The whole sea lit up, sparkling. Rey had half a mind to run straight to the well and have a nice, long drink. Of course, she didn't. She couldn't. Luke Skywalker was waiting for her. 

He was standing right on the shore, in fact, robed in grey and dusty brown, holding a mysterious linen satchel. Rey felt all her joy drain away when she saw the look on his face. He was watching her intently, with a look of such hurt, angry disapproval that Rey started to shiver. All her sweat reliquified, now cold on her skin. Force energy was visibly rolling around the landscape in an icy, crystal kind of blue. A cloud passed over the late day sun, leaving the promise of twilight behind like a stain.

"You've disappointed me, Rey," he said, when she came close enough to hear. "You left your training." The words filled her with a kind of horror. It sounded so much more _severe,_ now, when he said it like that. It surely hadn't been _that_ big a crime.

"I'm so sorry," she said, excuses on the tip of her tongue. "I just went to--"

He raised a hand to silence her. "When I left my training," he said, "I was ready to face Darth Vader as an enemy. I wasn't ready to face him as a human being. I didn't understand what that meant, and neither do you."

Images surfaced rapidly in her mind: Kylo Ren, beaten, bruised, helpless. Kylo Ren combing the bloodclots from his silken hair. "I...I think I do? I think I know that my enemies are human."

Luke snorted. "Of course. You think you know best." His face was flushed, withholding the second part of that thought: _just like Ben did._ "Why trust your Master?" He stomped toward her, swinging the heavy satchel he carried to prevent it dragging on the ground. For a moment, Rey thought he was coming at her, and she flinched; he proceeded to pass by, and make for the pod on the beach.

"I do trust you," she said, insistent. "I know I was wrong to go off world without telling you. I'm sorry."

"You didn't listen when I warned you," he huffed. "We take control because we are afraid, Rey. Afraid of others. Afraid of ourselves. Afraid we might not get what we want. I can't know who or what has tempted you. For all I know, you have found your way to the Dark Side--"

"No, Master!" Rey ran to him. He was inspecting the Corellian pod. He lifted the canopy and hastily packed the bulky satchel inside. "I don't presume to... I came straight back here because I believe I need your guidance. You see, my friend Finn is in danger, and--"

He cut her off again. "You were not ready for this test, but it is yours to complete, now. I cannot be responsible for what you chose." He climbed into the pod and prepared to close the hatches. Before doing so, he tossed the pod's broken transmitter out onto the beach; whatever his plans were, he obviously didn't intend on staying in touch with anyone. 

"Master," Rey managed to say, feeling like she was choking. "Please don't go!"

"I trust in you, Rey," he said. "You'll do the right thing." Rey had trouble believing him. She watched helplessly as the little crafts' engines fired to life. And then he was gone.


	6. Darker Blue

It took Rey a few days to comprehend that her Master had taken her pod and left her.

In the hour after Master Luke departed, Rey was too stunned to think. She let herself fall into the routine of any other evening--of yesterday, in fact. She ventured up to the cave on the hilltop and retrieved her towel to bathe. She washed in the spring on the western shore. She changed her clothing. She made herself ready rations from the small store of food Luke kept in his earthy, underground pantry. She lay down to sleep. Three times, she ran her hands down the rough fabric of her bedroll, kneading the coarse grass it was packed with. The whole while it sank in slowly, like a steady rain she could not shelter from; Master Skywalker was not going to help her. He was not there to finish her Jedi training. He was not there to help her rescue Finn or Poe.

 _You don't know that._ Maybe, she thought, he'd return. She'd thought Finn and Poe had left her behind, after all, and really, they'd only been captured. Rey's stomach seized with a heaving variety of nausea. What if Luke was captured? That pod couldn't get very far. It certainly couldn't move very quickly. What if he was going out on some Jedi errand, and he had every intention of coming straight back, but the First Order found him and took him? What if he meant to return for her but he couldn't? What if he was, at this very moment, trapped or injured or killed?

_Or what if he'd taken her pod and left her?_

She shoved this thought away like it might burn her. He was her mentor, her teacher. He was THE Luke Skywalker, last hope of the Resistance. She'd grown up on tales of his goodness and heroism and she'd grown strong, these past few weeks, under his tutelage. They were on the same team. He wouldn't leave. He couldn't...he wouldn't...

He'd be back for her. Someday.

The morning after he'd gone, Rey woke before sunrise, fully rested but unable to quiet the conflicted frenzy of doubts playing out in her mind. She considered carrying a few bucket-loads of water up from the well, just out of habit. Instead, she went down to the shore and retrieved the broken transmitter. Tinkering with this exotic old device would typically provide Rey with a necessary diversion. She had the small toolkit she used to service her lightsaber; it wasn't much, but she could make do. Unfortunately, she spent half the day making silly mistakes on what should be a simple procedural repair. "Ah...blast!" Rey swore, the third time she carelessly threaded the A wire through the X resistor. "Stupid thing..." She resolved to finish the job later.

Ahch-To was too silent that afternoon. Rey found herself pacing over every inch of the island, craving the cry of a gull or the crash of a breaker. The sea was unusually calm, providing no satisfaction on either account. When Rey returned to the cave, she conducted a sweeping search of the rooms, including the passages that Luke had forbidden her to investigate. She didn't know what she hoped to find: some sign, maybe, of Master Skywalker's plan, perhaps indicative of when he would return or what he wanted her to do. He'd been so vague--and so unwilling to listen. What _should_ she have done when Poe Dameron showed up, helmet in hand? Master Skywalker would never, ever have allowed her to break training. He'd made that clear before. In leaving to find and recover a friend, Rey had made a choice that she thought was _right._ Maybe the Jedi code didn't justify her decision, but _her_ code did. Even if that friend was still missing.

Rey brushed a tear from her eye and stomped from room to room.

The cave was empty. Excepting the limited, perfunctory contents of the pantry and the little lamps to give light, everything appeared to have been cleaned and packed away. Rey went to the wall where her bed-roll was: a speckled grey slab of limestone offering no amenities. She placed her hand on the cool surface of the rock. With one fingernail, she scratched a single tally mark into the stone. 

_He's taken the pod and left me._

On the second morning, Rey struggled to fight off despair. The weather turned foul and grey. With nothing else available to occupy her time, Rey managed to get the transmitter working. Its range, of course, was limited; she wouldn't be able to reach Carad'qa station or D'Qar. Still, a successful repair was always a small victory. It was a relief to Rey when she could make something work, make pieces fit together. She treated herself to an extra ration at dinner and tried hard not to think of the heaps of fruit and raucous company at Maz Kanata's cantina. Thoughts like those just made her ache for Finn. She wondered if he'd had anything to eat, or if he was being starved like the aliens in Y'aille Brut's holding cells. She couldn't finish her rations. She'd lost her appetite.

Rey grew sick with anger. How could he? How could Luke Skywalker abandon her when she really needed him? More importantly, how could he leave her there, without even a way off the bloody island?! _Ok. I have to do something._ Rey decided there and then that she could not waste her time waiting around like she had on Jakku. She was no _lost thing_ , not any longer; she was practically a Jedi. She could contact Luke via the Force. _I can convince him to come back...or at least send a ship..._ She went out to the stoney ledge where Master Skywalker regularly encouraged her to practice meditation and sat, criss-crossed, on the outcropping. Breathing deep, she unfocused her eyes and tried to reach her conscious mind into the distance. She looked for traces of Luke's signature blue, Finn's vivid green, Poe's turquoise. All she saw was the cloudy sky above, turning to night. _Please, please, I'll do anything,_ she murmured, growing impatient when no trance or vision whisked her away. 

Rey was reluctant to use the transmitter, since a short-range S.O.S. could be perceived by anyone, friend or foe, even the First Order. She laid awake half the night, tossing and turning, trying to think of a quick way off-world. She kept hearing Maz Kanata's words to the late Han Solo: "you're right back in the mess!" That was where Rey needed to be. She should never have left. Coming to Ahch-To at all had been a mistake; she should have stayed with Finn on D'Qar, or taken a job co-piloting the Falcon with Chewie. She regretted isolating herself so profoundly, in both a physical and spiritual way. That'd been the crux of Master Skywalker's method: isolation. _He's probably cloistered himself somewhere twice as remote, this time,_ Rey guessed. Maybe a desert planet. Maybe just a tiny hunk of unchartable, inaccessible rock, floating in space.

Sometime before midnight, Rey gave up on sleep and tuned the transmitter to a relatively seedy frequency. A brusque S.O.S. in a western encryption promised slim chance of response, but it was all Rey could risk. She took the device outside on the ledge, tapped out her message, huddled herself against the cold, and eventually, fell asleep with eyes aimed at the sky.

Rey woke to a star descending. Her first thought was of Luke. _He's come back._ Too quickly she sprang to her feet from the bedrock; her body was stiff, her mind groggy, and in her haste, she nearly toppled over the transmitter. Reminded abruptly of her outgoing message, Rey recalled that any number of alien crafts could be headed straight for her. She blinked away sleep and craned her neck to search for the twinkling "star" again. She found it, due west, growing larger and nearer; it was certainly a ship, glowing pink against the deep blue sky, headed toward the hairline umbra of pre-dawn around the horizon. 

She ran back into the cave and grabbed her lightsaber and an armful of brush. Bouncing the laser against the cliff for sparks, Rey built a messy signal fire on the little outcrop. The inbound ship, still little more than a pinpoint of light, was bound to discover Temple Island. Luke had set up his sanctuary on the second largest landmass on the ocean world. The peak was fairly conspicuous, even without Rey's efforts to broadcast her location. Still, it couldn't hurt.

 _Or could it._ Rey felt a ripple in the Force, and suddenly, the last thing she wanted was to broadcast her location.

Kylo Ren. Kylo Ren was, somehow, headed for her, in that beat-up Corellian freighter. _Rey..._ his thoughts whispered, already in her head, seeking her via the Force. 

_How did you know where to find me?_ she fired back. The Force veritably crackled with her displeasure.

 _Didn't,_ he confessed, _until you sent that S.O.S._

Of course. Rey cursed her naivety. He'd put a trace on the transmitter. How had she missed it? She must've been out of her head while repairing the blasted thing. He'd obviously compromised the circuitry, probably breaking it in the process of doing so.

 _Tell me about Luke Skywalker._ These words coursed through Rey's mind as she watched the mid-sized medical transport alight on the western beach of Temple Island. It skittered to a stop like a crab, a lump of grey shell on the seashore. Any minute, the sun would rise, and turn the lines of the starship sharp and pink with nascent daylight. 

Rey blinked to shift to her other perception. She could see Ren in the ship, blazing bright orange with Force, his energy spilling out in tendrils like ragged, flyaway hairs. The island and sea had their own color signatures: white-grey with traces of blue. The more saturate blue trail of her own energy was still laced here and there, over the paths she'd walked. Luke's shade of blue had long dissipated. Kylo, if he had any sensitivity at all (and he did) would have known before landing that Luke Skywalker was not present. He might even have been able to tell from space. Rey supposed, in fact, that he could probably just read her mind to divine exactly what she knew about Luke Skywalker, just as she could read his to discover his intentions. _Do you even care about Luke's whereabouts, or are you just here to abduct me again?_ With some trepidation, Rey attempted to probe Ren's thoughts.

 _This will go faster if we meet face to face,_ Ren noted. _Come down to me._

 _No. Leave!_ she huffed, sounding childish somehow, even in her head. 

Ren did not leave. He disembarked his ship, robed head-to-toe in black. Even without his mask, he looked morbidly intimidating, graceful, and almost theatrically sinister as he climbed the stairs. Rey felt oddly aware of her messy hair and sleep-rumpled robes. _This is not the time to worry about that,_ she scolded herself. _Finn and Poe in danger. Luke gone. Kylo approaching. Not everyone has time for a fucking wardrobe change._

"I must confess," Ren spat, when he'd finally mounted the excruciating number of stone steps required to come within speaking distance of Rey. "To ascertain the location of the First Jedi Temple is, indeed, a fortune. Yet it is not why I've come."

"So why _are_ you here?" 

"My wrath is bent on Y'aille Brut. I have come to give you one last chance to join me." 

Rey hesitated. She was well and truly desperate--but not nearly desperate enough to consider teaming up with Kylo Ren. He may have found her but he was _not_ about to keep her. Eyeing the Corellian transport on the beach, Rey decided it was time to learn from her Master's example. _Losers weepers,_ she thought, fingers hovering over the activation matrix of her lightsaber. _I'll take his ship and leave him._

Her mind made up, Rey stalled for time, thinking she might distract Ren and catch him off guard with a sudden strike. "Join you? Really? That's really why you've come? What guarantee would I have that, once we're finished, you wouldn't turn right around on me?"

He looked surprised. "None at all." He smirked a little, as if pleased with his own answer. Rey measured the drop from her position to Kylo's; she discreetly gathered the Force to her body, preparing to direct her offensive. 

"Well, that does sound promising," she drawled, stringing him along. "I'm very nearly sold..."

He frowned, sensing her sarcasm. "I see your Master has left you now," he said. "You've no choice."

"That's where you're wrong!" The moment was right. Rey pulled her lightsaber in a fluid, confident motion. She launched herself into a Djem So attack and jumped from the outcropping. Swiftly she fell, like a bolt of lightning, with every environmental advantage afforded to the attack. It wasn't enough. Kylo threw his arm out and, with a net of orange Force-energy, caught her in mid air. She hung there, trapped and suspended, frozen like a mote of dust.

"Don't do this, Rey," Kylo said. "It is not necessary to fight me. I came to you unarmed."

"Well that was a mistake!" she screamed. She sent a wave of energy back at him and he dropped her, right onto the rock. She felt the shock of it smash through every bone and muscle in her body. Ren came to stand over her and watch as she writhed in pain.

He regarded her with an angry scowl. It wasn't the legendary anger of the Sith on his face, oh no; it was something worse. He now sported the frustrated, low grade irritation that Rey associated purely with Han Solo. "Has literally no one ever offered to help you?!" he shouted at her. He balled his hands into fists and strained to recover some of his usual composure. "I know you seek the..." She felt him struggle to swallow the word _traitor._ "I know these persons Finn and Poe Dameron are concerns of yours. I do solemnly vow not to harm you or yours until you have ensured their safety. You can search my thoughts to confirm this oath."

Rey felt her breathing quicken. On the ledge above, the little fire she'd started as a signal was starting to smoke out. She felt a growing sense of frustration at Ren's seeming cordiality. "Why did you leave me my lightsaber?"

"What?"

"When you knocked me out. Why didn't you take it from me? Were you trying to gain my trust?"

"No, I..." He frowned at her again. He straightened, turning his face to the first rays of dawn with a sullen squint, as if looking for the right words to answer. "You earned it. You facilitated my...extraction...from Y'aille Brut's flagship." He held out a gloved hand. "Will you search my thoughts? I tire of your questions."

Tentatively, Rey reached out, her blue energy piercing Ren til it colored his hair and eyes. Soon he was swathed in blue, erased from sight along with the cliffs, the island, everything around. For a second Rey saw only light, then blue tinge around the edges of a memory that was not her own. She'd been transported to the altar of a cold, dark temple. There Kylo Ren stood, facing a small, withered old man--or woman?--with no hair and a heavily scarred face. They were not alone; a stiff-looking First Order General with ginger hair stood close by. 

"You have failed," observed the withered old thing, tilting its face toward a single, harsh beam of light. The light fell hard on the elder's robes, etching a tangle of shadows into the onyx floor of the dais.

"Supreme Leader," the General replied, "I wish for you to know that the full strength of the Finalizer is, even now, at the ready. I have over two thousand squadrons of Stormtroopers free to deploy. Moreover, we now know the location of the Resistance base--"

"Irrelevant. We cannot go against the Resistance now that Luke Skywalker is found. The new Jedi will rise. We must look in other directions." 

The General fidgeted. "Very well. If you give me even an hour, I can prepare a recommendation--"

"I know the best path forward. I have foreseen it." The elder turned toward a masked, supplicant Kylo Ren. Ren was leaning his weight on one foot, bending a little; Rey deduced that this whole conversation must have taken place shortly after the fight at Starkiller base. "Kylo Ren, my wounded apprentice. Are you prepared to complete your training and rise to the rank of Master?"

"Yes, Supreme Leader."

"Good. You should see a doctor to render your body whole and fit to serve. Then, go to the Ileenium system and discover the cartel, Y'aille Brut. They pose a small but immediate threat to the First Order. Find their flagship, the _Vivisector_ , and unleash the cascade of your fury upon them." 

"I will end them in righteous slaughter, Supreme Leader," Kylo vowed.

"Good, good. Reach out to me through Force when you feel ready for extraction. When you return to us, the blood of your many foes shall rise like a flood, washing away the failures of yesterday, anointing your reign as Master." 

"Yes, Supreme Leader."

The vision began to degrade. Rey saw Kylo boarding Y'aille Brut's ship, _the Vivisector,_ the same ship she'd been on. He hadn't expected to meet anything that could stand against him. Of course, there was something waiting for him, something entirely unexpected. It was squat, cloaked and hooded; it had a power that sank into Kylo's flesh like a nightmare. Rey experienced this with absolute horror. She sensed in this revenant some unwholesome skill, some strange ability. It was as if this thing could take what it wanted from a person and leave the other parts, still human-shaped, but forever altered, roaming the galaxy with slices of their souls cut out, maybe not even aware that they'd been fragmented. In and of itself, it possessed an incomplete quality, as if it might break open at any moment and reveal an empty cavity, slimy and wrecked. Rey, still deep in Ren's mind, shared Ren's alarming perception of the creature as a metaphysical _shard_ \--sharp, jagged, pointed to split apart anyone and everyone who opposed it.

"Enough," Kylo said. Rey blinked and found herself panting on the ground, looking up at the last wisps of smoke from her little fire on the sedimentary outcropping. She was coated in sweat and trembling despite the warm glow radiating from the newly-risen sun.

"What was _that_?" Rey gasped, referring to the threat at the end of the vision. Kylo knew what she meant. From the sweat on his brow it was evident that he, too, found the memory disturbing.

"The hidden might of Y'aille Brut," Kylo answered. "Will you help me destroy it?"

"Yes," Rey said. "I will." She regretted the promise, even as it slipped from her lips; she simply didn't know if she could face the hooded predator. It was weaponized disjointedness, wrapped in foaming, icy blue energy and an enigmatic anxiety. All these things were terrifying, but worse, they were all familiar. Rey had recognized, in Ren's vision, the awful kind of power that Y'aille Brut held. She'd felt it before--brushed it recently, in fact, though a part of her wanted to deny it. Deeply, viscerally, Rey knew who she'd just seen.

That thing was Luke Skywalker. _Or maybe just a piece of him?_ Either way, he was broken: more thoroughly and profoundly than Rey ever could have guessed.


	7. Red I

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It has been a REALLY long time between Chapter 6 and 7 updates. This is much too little, too late. 
> 
> The good news is, I'm writing to a pretty strict outline and this is about one third of the whole fic. The bad news is, I doubt I'll be back to finish. 
> 
> I know! I suck! It's a really good story! Come chat me on tumblr (millicentthecat) if you want to know what happens or if you want to pressure me.

Rey's head spun circles as she followed Kylo over the island's uneven terrain. She felt overflowing with anger, terror, and a nauseous kind of hurt. Losing to Kylo in combat had left her sore in body and in pride. Yet, somehow, this made it easier to follow along. If she was going to join up with someone, Rey _would_ prefer he be capable. 

Now, Kylo was walking fast, long legs and determined stride putting a broad distance between them. When he reached the freighter's boarding ramp, he disappeared into the dark door of the ship without waiting for Rey to catch up. _He chased me halfway across the galaxy,_ Rey thought, _and now he's acting like he'll leave without me._ As Rey boarded the antique craft she couldn't help but notice other signs of haste. Access panels lay open everywhere, revealing minor repairs, lazily done. Sloppy tape bound wires together; nothing was clean, including vital components and power couplings. Kylo still hadn't bothered to turn the lights on in either the hall or the bridge. When Rey reached him, he was powering on the engine. He hadn't even bothered to reset the nav-computer.

"Stop," Rey heard herself say. Everything was happening too fast. "I think we need to talk about what I just saw. In your head."

"Luke Skywalker belongs to Y'aille Brut," Kylo narrated, with a flat stare. As if she hadn't realized. As if he hadn't chosen to reveal this information in the most graphic way.

Rey flinched. "You knew. Why didn't you tell me?"

"You wouldn't have believed me."

Rey wasn't sure. She'd believed in Poe Dameron when he came asking for a quick favor. She'd believed in Luke. She'd believed her parents would come back for her. "Maybe not, but I wish you'd told me." 

"Noted," Kylo answered.

Rey took a deep breath. In, out. "Before that. Let's start with...the man you were taking orders from?"

"Not orders," Kylo corrected. "Spiritual guidance. He is the Supreme Leader."

"Ok. Your _spiritual guide._ " Rey made no effort to disguise her contempt. "You...left Master Skywalker to study under that...thing."

Kylo glanced at her, surprised. "You call him Master? Luke Skywalker?"

"It's a title," Rey growled. "No worse than Supreme Leader. Or _Kylo Ren._ "

"I need this name. It is the armour that enables me to fight for what I believe."

"Patricide?"

"No. Unity. Togetherness." 

Rey was nearly too angry for this. "How ... could you possibly believe in unity? You killed your own father!" She felt her face turning red. Her heart was racing. He, on the other hand, seemed calm. 

"Snoke taught me what togetherness means. The First Order are my true family. Before them, I only knew isolation, abandonment, loss. I am learning what it means to find my people--to be united together through the power of the darkness. I commune directly with my ancestors--"

"Bullshit!" Rey cut him off. "You could commune directly with your father if you hadn't killed him. Everything you're saying is garbage."

"You don't have to trust me," Kylo informed her. He sat in the pilot's seat. "You just need to sit down and hold on."

"I don't trust you and I won't--oh!" Without bothering to program in coordinates, Kylo was piloting the craft away from Ahch-To. Rey bolted herself to the first mate's seat to avoid being thrown.

"You're alright?" Kylo asked. He didn't bother to take his eyes from the horizon and check.

 _Am I alright?!_ The question was laughable. The fact that _he_ was asking it, as if he cared--Rey couldn't think about that. She inventoried herself, finding her body numb. Her mind was still attached to that image of Master Skywalker--a broken man, rent into pieces. One of those pieces was being used, somehow, by Y'aille Brut. "No. I'm not alright." _Why does everyone I trust leave me behind?_

Now Kylo did glance her way. He gauged her in a moment of silent assessment. Then, turning his eyes back to the controls, he cleared the planet's atmosphere, and let the ship idle as they moved into open space. "Luke Skywalker..." He said, softly. "I once called him master." Rey said nothing, so he went on. "He tried to kill me. Starved me, over-worked me, wouldn't let me sleep. He was constantly scaring me with this bogeyman: _the Dark Side._ If I didn't do well, if I wasn't strong enough, he would say, _maybe you're slipping._ Maybe you're going over to the darkness. I hated myself. I wanted to die."

Rey resented this diatribe for the stab of recognition it caused in her. "It was training," she said. "It was supposed to be hard." 

"I suppose you're an expert." The level melody in his sarcasm reminded her of Leia. 

"Training with Luke made me stronger," she assured him. Insistent.

Kylo shrugged. "Snoke showed me how to be strong without being alone."

For a long second, Rey choked. She was overwhelmed by a feeling she didn't have words for. She saw--the endless, empty ocean on Ahch-To--the sand on Jakku--the lines scratched into the side of her AT-AT. "You had a family who loved you!"

"My family..." He looked furious for a moment, then finally bothered to stand up and punch numbers into the nav-computer. After that, he fell silent.

Rey didn't want to let him off the hook. "Don't want to talk about it?" she chastised.

Rather than returning to his seat, he crossed the bridge to where she was sitting. Suddenly, he towered over her; Rey shrank. He crouched down, calm, close. He looked her in the eye and she could not look away. 

"I was a child when my father left, when my mother sent me away," he said. "They abandoned me. You know what it is to be abandoned."

"Yeah, I do," she spat, stalwart. "My parents abandoned me, as well. You don't see me going around killing people."

"Haven't you?" The inquiry was so soft and sincere. Rey blinked back the memories of Jakku: those she'd had to fight, to trap, to leave behind. Because it was necessary.

"At very least," Kylo pressed, "there's the Stormtroopers. "In the forest of Takodana, when you could have run, and instead, you fought."

"That's different."

"How?" he asked. "My father came to my house to abduct me. He brought explosives." 

"I won't entertain a discussion about whether Han Solo deserved to die!"

"It's not about who is deserving," Kylo answered. "He came to retrieve me. I stopped him. I'm not an object to be retrieved."

Rey found this somewhat halting. She bit back a glib remark about their escape from the Vivisector-- _but even then,_ she realized, _I was the one being carried out unconscious._ She didn't have a comeback. Her spine still hurt from where he let her slam against the rock during their fight on Ahch-To. _Losers weepers._ "Well what about--you murdered an entire generation of Jedi!"

"Oh, _that_ ," he muttered. "You believed Han Solo. He told you that I turned against Luke and spoiled the new generation of Jedi. That's what everyone thinks."

"That's what I think," Rey sniped. "Don't you dare try to tell me otherwise." She congratulated herself on sounding remarkably far from tears.

"I won't." He stood up, breaking the intimate atmosphere of their discussion. "Luke Skywalker was my Master when I left him. I won't get into it. Suffice to say I was not expecting him to belong to Y'aille Brut. But whether he does or does not, it is my duty to destroy him." He moved to initiate the hyperdrive.

"Do you know where he is?"

They went into hyperspace. Stars streamed across the three small viewports over the pilot's station. "I do."

Rey felt like screaming. Kylo Ren may have been a master interrogator, but his communication skills left much to be desired. "So? _Where is he?_ "

"Aboard _The Vivisector,_ I imagine. The ship I found him on, and where you found me. And no, that's not where we're going now. Not yet."

"Ok, so...where?" She pressed against his mind in the Force. _Answer me directly._

He glared at her. "We need weapons."

"Weapons?"

"Yes, weapons. This is an unarmed freighter, and we should change ships for other reasons. Moreover, I have no lightsaber."

"Right," she acknowledged. "Where are we going to get weapons?"

He smirked. Leaving the controls, he crossed the bridge and headed toward the corridor running the length of the transport. He paused in the doorway to look back at her. "We're going to scavenge them." With that, he left, sealing the door behind him.


	8. Amber

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Minor character death in this one, though I'm not sure if anyone will be as sour about it as I am. :(

Rey had every intention of storming after him--momentarily. She'd spotted a 'fresher just off the bridge, and priorities were priorities. She was washing up when a loud "pop" noise caught her attention. Idly, she recognized it as sounding like the fuel atomizer on the quad jumper.

Frozen, she suddenly remembered the ship she was on and its relative state of disrepair. "The _atomizer_!"

She hurled the door to the 'fresher open and bolted to the controls. Dashboard instruments reeled; the pressure gauges crashed. _Which is what we'll do,_ she recognized, _if I don't pull us out of hyperspace and fix this._ She didn't deliberate further; she knew what needed to be done, so she did it.

The ship lurched to a halt. At Rey's urging, systems began to shut down. She ran a diagnostic and confirmed her suspicions; it was around this time that Kylo found his way back to the bridge. "What's going on?" he asked, irritable.

"I just saved your life, that's what," Rey snapped. "We need to take a look at the fuel atomizer."

Kylo hesitated for only a moment. He lifted his hand. A small compartment below the right viewport opened and a metal device, compelled by the Force, moved through the air. He caught it.

"What are you--what is that?" Rey asked.

"This?" He squeezed the tool. "It's a hydrospanner. It hydrospans."

"Yes, but there are eight variations," Rey heckled, "and you really should be using the 1.5."

Kylo, Rey could swear, looked amused by this. "You haven't spent much time with other people, have you, Rey?"

"I've spent plenty of time around _other people_ , thanks," she said. A nauseous anger unsettled from her stomach to creep back up her throat. " _Most of it_ I spent doing repairs, working on machines, or fighting for my life in the blistering sand of Jakku."

"Mmm, sand," he murmured, somewhat disdainful. He turned away and headed for the corridor.

"Wait!" This time, Rey followed him. His legs were long and his pace was quick; she considered shouting again, but it'd done so much nothing the first time. He only just beat her to the elevator. "Idiot!" she did shout, watching the doors close.

She tracked him to the engine room, where he was already elbow-deep in an access panel, squinting at links to the fuel atomizer. Rey would gladly have fixed it if he’d asked. Of course he didn’t ask. A blinking orange light on the ion-array interface cast an intermittent glow onto his features, giving his cheekbones a warm edge, like embers on a wedge of dry wood.

"I don't like it when you call me an idiot," he said.

Rey huffed. “So what should I call you, then? Ren? Kylo? Kyle? Rennie? Ben Solo?”

He glanced at her, hardly taking his eyes off his work. A tiny frown formed in the spot between his eyes. “Kylo Ren will be fine.”

Rey gave a curt nod. “Ben Solo it is.”

He dropped his tools with a clatter and turned to her. As the light on the array interface dimmed, his pupils grew large and dark, as if they might swallow her. When he spoke, he was loud and clear: strained, making an effort not to shout.

“If a person’s name determines whether they are fed or starved, free or captive, living, or dead,” he said, “it is an act of violence to call them by a name which they do not call themself.”

Rey didn’t know what to make of this. “I’m sorry,” she said, unhumbled. “Are we past the acts of violence phase of our relationship?”

Kylo stood and drew close to her. She'd already forgotten his ability to loom. _Always remember him like this,_ she told herself. _Always remember the danger._ "Do you want to know a secret?" he asked.

"What?" Rey felt her skin prickle from his closeness. It might have been fear. It might have been the Force.

"There never was a Ben Solo. I was always me."

"You're--being dramatic," she stammered. "I don't even know the name my parents gave me."

"When you learn it, let me know how it fits." He returned to his workstation and powered up the atomizer. Rey could tell from the sound it was fixed and operational. "Time to go."

Glad enough to set the emotional topic aside, Rey moved her focus to their quest. "Are you going to tell me where we're going?"

"No."

"Why not?" she demanded.

"Because you're not going to like it."

She stared at him. "You said, we need weapons--"

"We have a stop to make first."

"Where?"

He rolled his eyes and began to fiddle with some of the fuel lines. "A First Order command outpost."

She took it as a good sign that he'd answered the question. "Why?"

"What do you mean, why?" She felt him flicker with rage. "To tell them I'm alive."

"To tell them you're--" Of course. Of course, wherever he'd gone to sit in a bacta tank and lick his wounds, it hadn't been anywhere his masters would see him. That'd be so _embarrassing._ "You haven't been back yet. You came straight to Ahch-To to get me."

"Basically, yes."

"So ... can't we just pick up weapons there?" Rey eyed the exposed circuitry scattered around the engine room. "And change ships?" 

"You have asked," he intoned, "too many questions."

Rey supposed the Order wouldn't have much spare Kyber crystal lying around. Nor would Kylo want to be seen in a First Order ship, if Y'aille Brut had some kind of vendetta. "One more question?"

He glared. Unmoved, she asked: "how long until we get there? I'd like to do some other repairs around the ship."

"Do your repairs," he said. "I'll let you know when we're approaching."

Rey proceeded to spend several hours doing repairs all around the ship--and pondering. Her thoughts climbed over and over every minute she'd ever spent with Master Skywalker. How long had he been part of Y'aille Brut? And _why?_ How did it happen, and would she ever get a chance to ask? She eventually laid down to rest, dozing off. Much later, beneath a hollowed-out, burned-up console, she woke. Tools were spread out around her and the hydrospanner, still in her hand, had left a compression mark. A soft "thud" signalled their drop out of hyperspace. Kylo's voice buzzed through the intercom. "We will arrive presently," he said. Nothing more.

Rey found a viewport where she could assess the station. It was everything she expected: massive, hard, dark, with clean lines and dramatic curves. The smooth surface and many ports and docks were all that distinguished it from a small planet. She held her breath, overcome by a feeling of dread. _I've made some terrible mistake._

They drew in close to dock. Rey knew something was wrong right away. There was an utter lack of Force signatures emitting from within the station; but more, there was the look on Kylo's face, the coil in his body. He hummed in the Force with the energy of threat. As the ship neared, he swore, and he pushed them into the hangar too quickly; the ship skidded on landing, jostling Rey to the point she almost fell.

"What's the matter?" she asked, but he was gone. He threw himself down the disembarkation ramp, single-minded. Rey followed, heart thudding in her chest. There was something familiar here. The stillness. "Where are the Stormtroopers?" She'd been expecting swarms of them; the first one she saw was laying on the ground. He wasn't moving. His helmet jutted to one side a dramatic angle that, Rey suspected, meant he would not be moving again. Rey thought of Finn, and also the Stormtroopers on Takodana.

When she reached the second or third airlock, Rey had to pause. She could see Kylo ahead, a motionless silhouette against the oval lights on the far wall. She heard him say a word she'd heard at Niima Outpost--she recognized it as an expletive, though she didn't know the language. "What is it?" she asked. Drawing closer she was greeted by a smell that stole the curiosity from the question. "Oh."

"Y'aille Brut has been here," he announced. Rey saw piles of white-armored bodies in the corridor. There were officers, too; they were unarmed, clearly having been taken by complete surprise. An emotion gripped Rey's stomach. She'd felt it before, on Jakku, and overwhelmingly when Han died. To some extent she'd felt it all the time, her whole life: anger. There was regular anger, though, and then there was that specific kind of anger that comes with death. It whispered all throughout her body as she followed Kylo deeper in.

His pace was reckless. She soon lost sight of him. She picked up his trail in the Force--yellow, now, a throbbing amber--outside the entrance of a cavernous room. Rey recognized it as some sort of communications center; she'd found the equivalent spaces within the skeletal Star Destroyers of Jakku and cleaned out their holo-tech. Rows of small desks encircled a central pit, like some form of theater. Rey couldn't see much else--just a jumble of debris in the bottom of the pit, strewn awkwardly over the flat floor. "It's too dark," she called.

As she approached the debris, she suddenly felt grateful for that.

The debris was unmistakably a corpse. She hadn't recognized it, at first, due to height and emaciation of the deceased. Some part of her mind still rebelled against the idea, but she'd glimpsed the features of something scarred and skull-like. _Nightmare fuel._ To her great horror, Kylo was bending to pick up the _thing._ He wrapped it in the loose folds of its robes, like a shroud, and carried it out like a terrible bride. Rey would never forget his look of fury. She jumped back to allowed him to pass through the door. Unable to get enough distance, she saw Kylo pause to watch her scramble like a nervous cat.

"If you're going with me against Y'aille Brut," he said in a low, even tone, "you are going to have to get used to the dead." To Rey's great surprise, his eyes brimmed over with tears.

They made their way back to the hangar. "Wait," Rey said, before they could board. "We should at least refuel and victual up?"

"They might still be here," Kylo said. He hesitated. "But you're right. Go quickly."

_Well. Guess it's me, then._ Rey found an evac map in the hanger and used it to locate the station's mess hall. She raided for water and portions (generally, Imperial and Order aligned ships had the best-quality and longest lasting supplies, if the most flavorless) and then proceeded to waste no time getting the freighter sky-worthy. _Though it's a bit of a toss up,_ she told herself, _the creepiness of hanging out here versus the creepiness of launching myself into space with those...remains....onboard._

Once they'd cleared orbit, Rey ventured to ask about it. "So that's..." 

"The Supreme Leader. Yes."

She'd been meaning to say, "someone you know." Her pulse sped as she took in the significance of this revelation. "But why was he all the way out _here?_ "

"Hiding. The First Order aren't exactly an established state. Our enemies are numerous."

True. Even so, Rey had conceived of the First Order as...well, as powerful. Fearsome. They were the heirs of the Great Empire, after all. Stories were told. "You're telling me this Y'aille Brut just took out the Leader of the entire First Order? What ARE they?"

"I don't know," he confessed. As if catching it on an afterthought, he added: "they're very dangerous to both of us."

"Yeah, I'm gathering." There was a very uncomfortable quiet.

Kylo fidgeted in the captain's seat, seeming to fight with himself about something. "I put him in medbay," he said, finally. "I want to have a funeral."

"Ok. We can do that--hey!" She flinched as he smashed a fist into a nearby console. "Watch that!"

"No need," he growled. He seemed to be teetering on the edge of himself. 

Desperate, Rey tried to distract, to calm him down. "You're yellow again," she stammered. "In the Force. Is that--does it have something to do with the Dark Side?"

"Yellow? What are you talking about?"

"Your aura in the Force changes color. Yellow to red, and back."

The confusion and fury fell from his face, leaving understanding. "I forgot Luke used to teach that. Color theory." For a second he looked off into the distance. Then, standing, he punched numbers into navigation. "Hold on," he said. They went to hyperspace.


End file.
